Hi Everyone! I hope you all had a great holiday season and are on your way to success in 2009. 

I have been working on a lot of new stuff lately and new training programs for The eHomes Realty Network.  Most of what I teach are things that I have learned through my business at Tropical Realty or from books or seminars. 

This past December I had the opportunity to go to see Tony Robbins perform his miracles.  He was truly amazing and I took so much away from his teachings.

So much of what he says relates to our business. 

Here are a few points:

Change the Meaning and Change the Outcome

I’ve learned so many things in my life and never realized how simple something is to change and implement.  As easy as this sounds is as easy as it is.  Here is the deal.  Right now almost every real estate agent I deal with around the country is complaining about how bad the Real Estate market is right now.  I hear the same story from everyone. ” I have 25 home listings and they are not selling.  The home sellers are yelling at me and blaming me because their home is overpriced”.  Everyone is talking about this terrible Real Estate market. 

What if you took a second and looked at it differently?  Firstly, if you are a seller it’s a tough market…no question.  Believe me, our office is in Melbourne, Florida, one of the worst hit in the country.  What if you looked at our business from the buying side?

Continue reading this post

There is a buzz in the air in Brooklyn right now which seems to be pointing to a busy Brooklyn real estate market for 2009. With today’s swearing in of Barack Obama the predominant feel in Brooklyn is one of hope and excitement. I believe this will have a positive effect on consumer confidence, especially with regard to buying a home in 2009.

As I stated in my previous Brooklyn, NY regional blog entries, record low mortgage rates combined with the correction that has taken place in home prices over the past year makes for many opportunities for a purchaser to get a great deal!

So far in January the market has been brisk. We have had a great surge of online consumers making inquiries on properties listed on the major “online” real estate portals. There has been a big response to our open house marketing; we had one property in Park Slope where we had 25 home buyers show up in a two hour time period. As usual, motivated buyers and sellers (and dare I say real estate agents) are making deals happen.

The main thing I stress to my agents is to pre-qualify their homebuyers, make sure they are educated about monthly carrying costs and then show them every single solitary property that is within their price range. Do not worry about meeting the purchaser’s expectations; simply show them everything out there and then some. The serious buyers will then pick the home that best meets their needs.

We just finished compiling our numbers for 2008. Sales volume for my company was down, but only by 3%, which relatively speaking is great (teetering on awesome). This is due to the fact that

Continue reading this post

At Inman Connect last week I had the pleasure of meeting Matt Fagioli.  Mr. Fagioli, a HomeGain AgentView customer, has organized an impressive “Inman South” conference called RETech South, which boasts a fine roster of speakers to be held at the Gwinnett Center in Atlanta on Friday March 20.

Yesterday Matt and I spoke about RETech South and its objectives.

Matt is also a member of HomeGain Nation a 200+ member interactive forum on the Ning platform. This morning Matt posted a blog entitled “How Print Marketing Still Brings Home the Bacon” and I have reproduced it in its entirety here:

How Print Marketing Still Brings Home The Bacon

I had the pleasure of a phone call yesterday with our friend Louis. His view of “all this 2.0 stuff” is really refreshing because he realizes that while it’s all very cool and trendy and slick, it does NOT replace print marketing - nor does it replace the good old fashioned handshake. Our 2.0 world merely compliments our off-line efforts.

Continue reading this post

Posted on behalf of Peter McCullough, Real Estate Training Specialist at HomeGain.

“A sales lead is the identity of a person or entity potentially interested in purchasing a product or service, and represents the second stage of a sales process. For a sales lead to qualify as a sales prospect, or equivalently to move a lead from the process step sales lead to the process sales prospect, qualification must be performed and evaluated. Typically this involves identifying by direct interrogation the lead’s product applicability, availability of funding, and time frame for purchase. If a sales lead eventually makes a purchase, this is called conversion and a closed sale. The ratio of sales leads that convert is often referred to as the conversion rate, a way to measure the effectiveness of a sales process, sales team, or sales person.”

OK. This is straight from Wikipedia.com. It is a straightforward description of a lead and it is relevant to the real estate community. However, I feel an analogy would help further reinforce what a lead is.

Everyone is familiar with the famous detective Sherlock Holmes. As well as real estate agents, Sherlock required leads to solve his cases and close them. A lead pointed him in a specific (or vague) direction. It was not necessarily the solution to the case, but it gave him something to pursue.

Real estate related leads are the same. They are not a closed deal; they point agents in a direction and give them something to pursue. In Sherlock’s situation, he could not afford to sit on the information contained in a lead; time was of the essence. Such is the case for real estate leads.

Continue reading this post

“Buy this book.” ”This is the Ultimate Sales System.”  ”You can’t help but succeed when you follow our proven system.”  Blah blah blah.

“What do you attribute your success to?”

“Oh, I’ve always been unique.”

Let’s say that the person actually was unique, that he or she was correctly answering the question.  If that was true would there be any reason whatsoever to even bother listening to anything regarding techniques or methods they had to say about success?  If it couldn’t be replicated what difference would it make? 

Or if you wanted to learn to swim at a championship level would hearing Michael Phelps say, “The secret of winning each of those races was I swam faster than the other swimmers”?  Would hearing that help you to swim faster?  Oddly enough, it just might.

I’ve been in the house selling business for 31 years.  My first twelve years I was an ordinary 17 – 22 deal a year guy: living from one closing to the next, never really having a stable business.  I clearly understood that there was “something” that the stably successful mega agents had that I didn’t but I didn’t know what “it” was.  

Continue reading this post