The market in Columbus Ga MLS is typical of markets all across the country.  Sales are down.  That said, our economy is more stable than most and for this reason we have not seen the dramatic drop in home prices.

Homes priced right and well maintained are still selling quickly.  Homes with any problems or that are overpriced are being overlooked.

Here is a snapshot of 2008 vs. 2009 :

• Home prices are down about 4%
• Total Homes sold are down 21%
• Home sales in the $100K to $200K level are only down 17.5%
• Home sales in the $200K to $300K price level are down 35%
• Home sales in the $300K to $450K price level are down 22%
• Home sales in the $450K and up price level are down 27%

New home sales and foreclosures account for a large portion of the sales in the Columbus GA/Phenix City home market this year.  The normal resale homes are the ones really staying on the market.

So, it is very important for resale clients to price their homes aggressively and to have their homes in pristine condition when they go on the market!

Wayne will be hosting a session titled “Prospecting, Proposals, Pipeline: AgentEvaluator” at HomeGain Live Nation in San Francisco on August 3rd at 2pm. Twitter it #homegainnation.

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Click to learn more about Columbus Georgia Real Estate and Columbus home prices.

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Nowadays there are lots of coaches teaching people how to be successful in real estate, but I haven’t seen anyone instructing people on how not to be successful.

If you simply don’t want a lot of business or can’t handle too much, here is your game plan:

1.  Do not use the internet. The majority of buyers start shopping for a home on-line so it’s going to bring you too many contacts.  Do not create your own website – instead, stick with the newspaper.  You’ll get less prospects for more money here.

2.  Do not follow up with any prospects. If they want your help, they will call you.  Absolutely do not call them – you may wind up with more business than you can handle.

3.  Do not return phone calls promptly. If the people really need you, they’ll call back.

4.  Hold lots of open houses. It’s better to have prospects come to you instead of you going after people.

5.  Take up-desk time at your office. Again, you can sit back and wait for people to call.  You don’t have to make any effort to get business.  And an additional benefit, you can eat all of the food in the office fridge and swap war stories with other like-minded sales associates.

6.  Do not attend any conventions or trade shows. Too many new fangled, untested ideas there.  Stick with the tried and true.

Well, that should get you on your well to a nice, slow start.  Don’t want to overwhelm you with too many ideas at once.

Barry Karch is a REALTOR® with Prudential BKB, REALTORS in El Paso, TX www.HomesForSaleInElPasoTexas.com

I haven’t sold a house in about 5 years. Ok, maybe one, but only because an old friend insisted. I’ve found a niche: Listing real estate in Ledyard, CT. I love the marketing and the negotiating and have the systems in place to do it pretty well. I do it well enough, that a year ago I dissolved my team and sold my company, RE/MAX Realty Group in Gales Ferry. I moved to a home office but stayed with the company and kept my awesome assistant. Now I concentrate on what I do best.

Seth Godin in a blog post today calls it Island Marketing. Ledyard, CT is my island. I’m slightly famous in my town because I focus on just 15,000 people. I support everything local and run ads in tiny economic publications like the Ledyard Fair Brochure, the Ledyard Home and Garden Tour Guide, and the Memorial Day Parade booklet. You can find my Blog URL on school calendars, baseball jerseys, and Parks and Recreation schedules.

I don’t plan to sell a house this year or even next year. So why would I be such a big fan and user of BuyerLink™?  When I worked with a team, HomeGain’s BuyerLink product kept my buyer’s agents busy. Today I use BuyerLink as an extra source of income by referring my HomeGain buyers to those same agents on a referral basis. I provide no other support as I did when I was a team leader. They are happy for the business and travel Eastern CT showing houses. I stay happy on my Island enjoying the fruit.

Linda will be participating in a session titled “Traffic, Leads, Conversion: BuyerLink” at HomeGain Live Nation in San Francisco on August 3rd at 2pm. Twitter #homegainnation

I thought it would be worthwhile to show agents, particularly HomeGain BuyerLink and AgentEvaluator members, some true stats of Internet leads (from one Realtor to another).

My goal in gathering this data was to discover  home buyer tendencies.  I randomly took 100 of our sales this year to come up with the following stats.

I figured it’s roughly 50% of our sales this year and would be a great sampling.

The main findings were the following:

Average Number of Days to Purchase: 180.5 days

Quickest Sale: 5 days

Longest Sale: 539 days

(Last year we had approximately 20 sales from leads that were from the year 2004.)

Number of Closed Leads with Phone Numbers: 88

Number of Closed Leads with no Phone Number: 12

(This is a tough number to quantify as many of our Agents put the phone numbers in the CRM once they have obtained it.  When I worked on this stat two years ago, we were at 25% of our sales came from leads with no phone number.  I believe we are most likely still around that level.)

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Long time AgentEvaluator member, Virginia Cheezum, who has recently been inducted into the prestigious HomeGain Diamond Club, met with me to discuss the changes she’s seen in her market this year (in Virginia), how she’s adjusting her business, how AgentEvaluator keeps her busier than ever — and how it helps put her in the top percent of real estate agents across the U.S.

Listen in as Virginia Cheezum of RE/MAX Allegiance divulges some of her best tips for how to achieve a half million dollars from the AgentEvaluator program.

Hear the HomeGain Radio Clip:

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is becoming more important to Realtors® each year. These lesson snippets, provided by Eric Blackwell, Director of Technology with RE/MAX Properties East, will help you understand the importance and how to leverage SEO to your advantage.

Let’s start with the TOPICAL INFORMATION. In the SEO business, this is what is known as On Page Optimization. Search Engines index your pages and the only thing that they can see is text so it is important to write/build web pages so that the text is visible to the search engines.

1. Provide QUALITY content.

2. Write search friendly titles for your posts, pages and articles that will attract readers and be something that they will search for. The title will show up on the search engine as a headline and that is what you need to keep in mind.

3. Avoid duplicate content. Why should Google, as the librarians of the internet, keep hundreds of copies of the same book or post or article on the front page? (Hint: They don’t.) When you write on your blogs, be original and unique. It will not only rank better, it will attract more readers.

To get the full lesson and receive the monthly SEO newsletter, sign up for AgentView.

Mr. Blackwell will be hosting a session titled “SEO Is A Team Sport” at HomeGain Live Nation in San Francisco on August 3rd at 2pm. Twitter @homegainnation