We have had tremendous advancement in our industry in the last ten years.  Realtors have more tools at their disposal than ever before.  We have Internet sites, MLS, contact managers, blast e-mails, and blackberries.  These are all great sales tools, but they aren’t the best.  The best sales tool, after all of these changes, is still the phone.  It’s also the tool used most infrequently by the majority of agents for prospecting and lead follow-up. For anyone in sales, there are only four ways to increase production.  Those four are: number of contacts, method of contacts, quality of prospects, and quality of the message.  The phone directly relates to number of contacts and method of contacts. The phone allows a more efficient means of pe

When I read things like this, I keep an eye on these areas for great oppertunties to purchase  income properties. I was always told when life gives you lemons make Lemon-Aid  

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Five Cities With Biggest Decline in Home Values

by AnnaMaria Andriotis

May 16th, 2008

With home values continuing to plummet across the country, it's become clear that the real estate meltdown is far from over.

In Part 3, we discussed the scenario of “The Old Switch” in which the buyer and seller agree to change the sales price and the seller gives a kickback to the buyer at closing.  In this fourth article of the series, we’ll introduce “The Contractor’s Scheme.”

I was reviewing an article on Mortgage News Daily and was shocked to read that lawmakers are planning to legislate that “mortgage companies show that its customers can realistically afford the mortgages they are offered.” WHAT???

Isn’t part of the requirement for lending NOW? Isn’t this part of the job description? We need new laws for THAT? This can and should be done every single time, without exception!

Don’t you love it when every now and then you just happen to have the perfect answer to a question? That doesn’t often happen to me, but it did last November. I (along with about 25,000 other agents) was attending the National Association of REALTORS® annual conference in Las Vegas, and while I was there, my friend Michael Krisa caught up with me and we had lunch together. Little did I know he was going to ambush me with his video camera! (Hey, what are friends for, right?)

So here are the points I was t-t-trying t-t-to make in the video clip. (You’ve gotta love raw video!) By the way, the clip was originally posted by Michael on Real Blogging.

Reported today on INMAN News was an interesting article about SecondSpace, an online marketplace targeting the second-home market. The company also launched three new sites in Canada and the United Kingdom that aim to connect brokers, developers and agents to buyers and owners of vacation property around the globe - ResortScape.CA, ResortScape.Co.UK and LandWatch.Co.UK. 

    Nothing delights a teacher more than an enthusiastic student who without delay sets to work on the new skill acquired.  Such was the case when Mary Jankowski of Reid Real Estate in Bremerton Washington took The Power of Staging class recently.  Her eagerness paid off as she set to work staging her listing.  Less than 3 weeks after taking the class and after only 5 days of staging the home using the clients’ furniture and a few acquired accessories, she had an

In Part 2, we introduced the scenario of “The Flip” in which there is a “strawman” established in the middle of a transaction between seller and strawman, and another between strawman and buyer.  In this third article of the series, we’ll introduce a scenario dubbed “The Old Switch.”

A report released in March of this year opened with … A "Statement of Inevitability" states that "consumer-focused real estate Web sites are gathering more and more information," and "without convenient, immediate access to information to analyze/interpret for their clients and customers, Realtors will no longer be at the center of real estate transactions." 

The report, released by NAR’s Gateway Presidential Advisory Group, states that the project has been renamed to The Real Estate Channel (TREC) and is focused on enabling the real estate community to continually expand the breadth, depth, immediacy and power of trusted real estate information available to
Realtors. 

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.