Learn from the Real Estate Masters at RealBlogging.com

In this installment, we’ll move on to the third thing you need to become a mega-producer in today’s real estate climate — the tools, strategies, and the discipline to manage all those low-cost leads for the time required to actually complete transactions with a large number of them.

I must confess that it’s very frustrating to see agents possess the very tools they need for their success and yet fail to take that last step — the step to making it all come together. I once was a struggling agent and nearly quit the business until I developed the lead capture gateway that quite literally turned my business around forever, so I’m very passionate about having the ability to generate as much business as you want or need to make your professional dreams come true.

read more

... the "mosquito fish."  (AKA: Gambusia Affinis.)

image courtesy: wikimedia commons

It can apparently eat up to 500 mosquito larvae a day and give birth to up to 60 little gambusians a month while surviving adequately in oxygen-depleted water. That is, environments similar to those stagnant swimming pools and back yard spas on properties left vacant in a foreclosure; great breeding grounds for mosquitos-borne diseases, like West Nile virus. (Source: WSJ.)

read more

Why:
 
The real estate market is slower right now and more and more home sellers who want and need to sell are not doing so as quickly as in the past.  This means there is a bigger pool of potential clients in the expired listings that pop up every day.

How:

read more

I know what you are thinking…how old fashioned is this person?  Well, to tell you the truth, it’s not me, it’s one of my agents Mary Lou Thompson.  Mary Lou believes we do ourselves and our children a disservice by allowing them to override all adult conversation and interaction.  Let me tell you why she believes this….

read more

...These visuals (download here) from Ben Bernanke's "heat maps" show a striking picture of some of the hardest hit areas for mortgage delinquencies. I pulled out just one of those maps for display below, showing the change in mortgage delinquency from 2004 to 2007.  What particularly jumps out is that almost all of California and Florida are caked in red.  Others hard hit: Michigan, Maine, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

read more

On a fairly regular basis, I hear people comment that this person’s or that program’s form letters or fliers are bad/not for their market/hokey, you-fill-in-the-blank.

The value in ‘canned’ content is not necessarily in that you can take them as they are, and start using them. While it is true that there are some things, some times, that can be good they way they are, or pretty close, it is rare. The value is in the fact that the content, the concept, is already there for you, and pretty much done. What is left for you to do is to tweak it to your personality, and/or your market. The value is in not having to start from scratch. Starting form scratch takes a great deal of time. That’s where the value is; the time savings.

read more

In a previous post, we introduced the topic of mortgage fraud and some of its players.  In this second article of the seven part series, we’ll introduce the first of several scenarios in which fraudulent transactions manifest.

The “Flip.” While not illegal on their face, “flip” closings have been blamed for a number of mortgage fraud transactions in which the title company was allegedly complicit, resulting in fines in the millions of dollars against various title companies throughout the United States, levied both by the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the respective States’ Department of Insurance.

read more

There's a bit of buzz about Redfin's recent site upgrade. 

Live as of last Wednesday, the upgrade has added bank-owned foreclosures and FSBO listings to their inventory display.  

The bit of the controversy comes the question of how they were able to get around the MLS co-mingling display issue; the FSBO listings are listed alongside those from the MLS.  (Ref. 4.13 in MRMLS IDX policy... "Listings obtained through IDX must be displayed separately from listings obtained from other sources...")

read more

...or can they?  It was hillarious reading the thread on real estate webmasters initiated by Mr. Ron Park.  Mr. Park was miffed about the results of his $10,500 outlay to try and clone Redfin. 

read more

Zillow has announced that they have entered into a listing agreement that allows all Homes.com hand-entered property listings to be fed directly to Zillow.com at no additional cost to the agent or broker. The first listing Homes.com feed to Zillow was 105,000 active property listings. 

read more