Mortgage rates jumped in the past 7 days because of rising oil prices. This is the staglationary fear I expected. Mortgage rates have increased to 6.0% (30 year fixed) today.

I expect mortgage rates to rise another .25% in the next 14 days for these reasons:

1. Possible uncertainty at the Federal Reserve Bank.
2. Oil above $125/barrel (which translates to $4/gal. gasoline at the pump)
3. Inflation affecting the European economy.

Bond traders hate uncertainty so we expect a lot of volatility through Labor Day. Continue reading this post

Mike Farmer’s excellent post on Earning Our Keep reminds us of the many things that Realtors do to facilitate transactions.

Later this year, HomeGain will announce its 3rd Annual Real Estate Agent Appreciation Campaign.

Last year as part of our 2nd Agent Appreciation Campaign, we published “101 Reasons to Use a Real Estate Agent”.

We’d like to update it for this year’s campaign.

Please take a look and feel free to add to it additional items or more importantly to give examples of how you handle some of the items on the list. Continue reading this post

Continue reading this post

This week has been a week of baling wire and duct tape trying to keep deals together. Patience! Oh, what a wonderful virtue.

Patience to deal with the shifting numbers that inch closer to Yes!, patience with personalities that run the gamut of kind and understanding to rude and arrogant, patience with real estate agents who are slow to respond, patience with lenders who change the rules at a drop of the hat, patience with attorneys who hire temps, patience with home sellers who think their homes are made of gold—why do we do this?

Because that is what we are paid to do, have patience and keep deals together.

For all the do-it-your-self home buyers and sellers doing it themselves for the first time—BEWARE! there are dangers ahead.

How can deals go south?

Financing problems, cold feet, inspection problems, newly disclosed information, buyer buys a Harley before closing, on and on and on, but we must have patience.
Take a deep breath and look at the situation—break it down—then look for a solution.

Sometimes the situation calls for a little Continue reading this post

Do We Really Need To Twitter?

A few years back I knew a guy who had one of the first blackberries. Armed with this new device, he would fire off incessant and inane emails while outside of the office, just because he could.

The emails often contained numerous typos, cryptic messages, stray useless thoughts and were sometimes sent to a few too many addressees, many of whom may have been the subject of ridicule in the emails. Continue reading this post

How we as agents interact with consumers has changed over the past several years largely due to the widespread dissemination of information over the internet.

In years past, we have had to focus on creating interest in real estate by using buzz words like character, elegant and my personal favorite – charming. The truth is that these words don’t mean very much and what they do mean is different from one person to the next.

My experience with home buyers today is very different than it was even just three or four years ago and they don’t want me or anyone else trying to gloss over faults in a home by calling it character or smoothing the edges of an aging and outdated home by calling it elegant.

More often than not, buyers today would prefer to learn the facts, call a spade a spade and decide based on the information.

From a conversion standpoint, the more information you give them, the better chance you have of turning them into a client. Pivoting off of the idea that online consumers are in research mode first, the best chance to convert them is Continue reading this post