Well, Max and I spent a day at the Masters last week—now I hear he’s traveling the country. I wanted to get a picture of Max at The Masters but the no-camera rule made it too difficult to find the right place outside the crowded gates.

We had fun, though, and Thursday night got into a long discussion about social networking in the online world of real estate.

A lot has been written lately about the meat and potatoes of practical lead management. To get leads and not manage them effectively is like hitting the greens close to the hole and not making the putts (Max came up with that—he’s all about golf analogies, now).

Organization and follow-through seem to be key, but once a system is in place to handle a large amount of leads effectively, then an agent can concentrate on increasing leads and assessing the quality of leads.

Wayne wrote a good article about lead quality. A big part of efficiency and getting results is quality control—once you are generating quality leads and wringing out the inefficiency of cold leads that aren’t amenable to warming, then the system is creating solid results and the conversion rate climbs—I think keeping an eye on conversion rate is critical to any quality control effort.

It doesn’t matter how strong the leads might seem, if all they create is work on your part with no conversion to sales, then it’s a red flag that the leads might not be that good Continue reading this post

Why is HomeGain’s BuyerLink program successful for our business? It is just PPC (pay per click), isn’t it? Couldn’t I do this myself and save money? Wouldn’t it be better to just use the natural search and not pay for clicks at all?

These are all valid questions I have asked myself – especially in a tough market like this – and I am sure I am not the only one asking! We all need to run our budgets as lean and mean as possible right now.

Isn’t the BuyerLink program just PPC and couldn’t I do this myself?

BuyerLink is a form of PPC but it is professionally administered. There is a whole learning curve involved with learning to run a successful PPC campaign. You will pay for this learning curve in one way or another. We could run it ourselves and just make the mistakes that are inherent when an amateur attempts something like this. That is one way to pay for it.

Another way is to simply hire someone to teach us. This is another form of payment but what if things change and the skills we learn become obsolete? Will we be able to keep up with current trends? Probably not.

The final way to pay for PPC is simply to allow HomeGain to administer it for us with skilled professionals who do this every day. To me that makes the most sense as I have other things to do and this is not my expertise. Continue reading this post

Equipped with a few cases of coconut milk and a half dozen jars of jelly beans, Max hit the road today on a “What’s Your Home Worth?” awareness campaign.

Max has been raising his profile as part of a continuing series of “Plan B” responses to the Cars.com Superbowl ads back in January.

Since the Superbowl, Max has been seen with increasing frequency on ActiveRain, Inman News, Sellsius Blog and Yahoo! Real Estate.

“We definitely want to emphasize the “Max Factor” in our marketing,” said Louis Cammarosano, General Manager of HomeGain.

“When Jessica Gopalakrishnan, our Senior Marketing Manager, came up with the idea of sending Max on the road I was hesitant. I know Max, he is a proud gorilla. I was concerned that Max Continue reading this post

I’m still floating mortgage rates, unless my clients are closing within 14 days. I’m cautiously floating because of the volatility in the market. Fundamentally, mortgage rates shouldn’t have a whole lot more room to come down; the Fed cuts are probably coming to an end.

Something much more drastic than the Fed open market activities will be needed to pull us out of the recession.

Yep. I said the R word and have been since last fall. I’m not scared of the recession; I welcome it.

Here’s the trick for mortgage rates. The weak dollar has world investors believing that the Fed’s easy money policy is inflationary…

UNTIL…

The recession hits them. Make no mistake about it, the economic slowdown is a global phenomenon. Canada and the UK are following suit by cutting rates. I think the world wide recession will lower oil prices and provide some much needed relief to the American consumer. Continue reading this post

I’m a research person. I love having lots and lots of research to back up my statements and decisions.

So, let’s first take a look at the blogosphere as a whole, how it began, how it grew and where it is going.

According to Dave Sirfry’s April 2007 report on the blogosphere, Technorati currently tracks 70 million weblogs. The report shows that 120,000 blogs are created each day with 1.4 blogs created every second.

Since October 2006, there a slight slowing in the growth of the blogosphere which was expected as its previous growth rates were staggering having grown 60 times what it was in 2004.

In 2006, the blogosphere saw 1.3 million postings per day or 15 posts per second, whereas in 2007 it grew to 17 posts per second. Interestingly, the percentage of blogs in the top 100 reached approximately 25% (22 blogs). Also, interesting is the consumer perception that blogs are just as good a news outlet as main stream media sites like the New York Times.

The breakdown: Continue reading this post

The Upland Real Estate market is facing pressure with a lot of inventory. There are still far too many homes on the market, with tons of choices and few home buyers.

I have noticed a lot of home buyers are starting to make the move and write offers on the short sale, or bank-owned homes. This is affecting the regular sellers and their bottom line.

Many sellers are starting to realize that they are not going to get the price they had hoped to get. But, then again, they will get the next home for much less than they had thought, as well. As long as they keep that in mind it will work out in the end.

This market will work itself out as soon as the inventory drops down.

The surrounding areas of Ontario, Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana are really feeling the affects of supply and demand, with a lot of supply and very little demand. The City of Fontana has 395 single family homes for sale for $250K, or less. A year ago you could not find any single family homes under $300K.

There are still a lot of loans that will be reset to higher rates over the next year. This will result in Continue reading this post