It's been fascinating to witness developments in the home staging industry over the past few years.  For my first few years as a staging instructor I had to define and explain staging.  Nowadays it is a phenomenon that has changed the way real estate is sold.  In 2004, I ‘Googled’ home staging, there were 16,768 entries.

GMAC Financial Services has sold GMAC Real Estate to Brookfield Asset Management, Inc., the owners of Royal LePage, the largest Canadian residential real estate brokerage company. The transaction is expected to close before year end. The transaction includes all three of GMAC's home services divisions including: GMAC Global Relocation Services, GMAC Real Estate and GMAC Home Services Mortgage.

Many Agents today are working longer hours to keep on the treadmill of life.  They are delaying, or scrapping, long-range focus in the marketing and prospecting business system arenas.  They often are neglecting their time investments for their health, families, and self-development areas of their life.  They are spending a tremendous amount of time working on their business.  They are truly an employee of their real estate business, rather than the owner, CEO, and visionary of their multi-mil

Better late than never I suppose!!  I just got information late yesterday regarding a little known opportunity for people who secured an FHA loan within the past 5 years.  Some of you may be all over this, but agents in my community had no idea this was an option so I am assuming that a lot of agents and loan officers are not privy to this information.  Home owners can refi their FHA loans with no credit check, no appraisal and no income verification as long as they have not been late on a payment.  The problem is.....they only have until 5pm today, September 30, 2008 PCT, to put their name on t

With 3,460 respondents casting 6,099 votes, the real estate professional community has decided who the Top 25 Most Influential Women are. And what an incredible list of powerful women this list represents. 

So said John McCain during his acceptance speech and the RNC convention. 

And I think he’s right! 

Bringing a person from being a lead to generating a transaction is becoming increasingly more complicated…or is it?  I am looking at this situation from the brokerage point of view and how company generated leads are being handled and what we can do to help generate solid business for our agents from these inquiring consumers. 

I promised you a “virtual tour” of a “virtual company”, so let me walk you through my office and give you a guided tour.  That will help you picture how our model is so different.  In the last article I shared how visiting our company for two short days gave one of the top brokers in the world a meltdown, and a wake-up call.  Maybe I can get your wheels turning too, and maybe I can help you actually visualize this virtual office model.  And don’t hesitate to call or email questions or post comments to this article.  I’ll do my best to answer them.

Benjamin Moore has gotten the thumbs up in an article from at least one of our contributing authors in the past for customer service.  Today, I add my thumbs up to Benjamin Moore in another category I'll call customer enablement.

With all the competition out there today and the growing emphasis on team building, I went back into the iSucceed vault and listened to a TeleSeminarI did with iSucceed mentor, Patrick Stracuzzi of Stuart, Florida.  Here a few thoughts from that program that stuck in my mind on building a solid team.   

The Need for a Team

My first hire showed me I needed a buyer's agent. The first person I actually hired was an administrative person. Here is what that did: It enabled me to free up a lot of my time by delegating paperwork, allowing me to spend more time working with buyers.