We are pleased to announce a new club for real estate members, called the BuyerLink Winner Circle. Today we inducted the first 6 members, who, together, averaged over a 1,000% return on investment (ROI) in 2009 from BuyerLink! Read the press release.

The first 6 members of the BuyerLink Winner Circle are:

• Michael Lissack of Buy-in-Naples.com in Florida ($13 million total property value; and $325,000 total annual commissions from a $1,200 monthly budget, equaling a 2,256% ROI)
• Debra Gravelle of RE/MAX Professionals in Washington (15 home sales, $2.3 million total property value; $50,000 total annual commissions from a $200 monthly spend, equaling a 2,083% ROI)
• Mitch Ribak of Tropical Realty in Florida (290 home sales; $44 million in total property value; and $1.4 million total annual commissions from a $6,000 monthly budget, equaling a 1,944% ROI)
• Diane Varni of RE/MAX Allegiance in Virginia (over $28,000 total commissions from a $350 monthly budget, equaling a 667% ROI)
• Ron Petzel of Realty Executives Mainstream in Florida (55 home sales; $7 million in total property value; and $206,000 total annual commissions from a $3,850 monthly budget, equaling a 445% ROI)
• Dave Richert of RE/MAX Town and Country in Illinois ($850,000 total property value; and $21,250 total annual commissions from a $600 monthly budget, equaling a 295% ROI)

(Numbers have been rounded.)

Interested in becoming a part of this elite group? Please email us and we’ll be happy to explain further.

I had the pleasure of speaking with Tim Dalene of Hampton’s Green Alliance in New York the other day. He had an impressive story to share in regards to Green building.

Hampton’s Green Alliance (HGA) is a non-profit organization, created to be a Green resource for Green building on the east end of Long Island. For this project they brought together a group of local sub-contractors who specialize in difference areas of Green building and came up with innovative ways to create efficiencies within the home.

Their goal? They wanted to create a house where they could answer questions previously unanswered like how much would a Green house cost, what would need to be done, what kind of energy efficiencies could be incorporated — basically what does a Green home mean?

Taking the foundation of an existing home on Long Island that had burned down, this is the story of how the community came together to rebuild it, entirely from recycled and sustainable materials, so the home would be “carbon neutral” and would have “net zero energy”, meaning the homeowners will break even after 8 years, and ultimately not pay for electricity or gas, estimated at a $230,000 savings.

Listen to the HomeGain Radio Clip (approx 10 minutes):

Visit the HomeGain Green Real Estate page.

Listen to more HomeGain Radio calls.

Eric Pakulla, a Realtor® with RE/MAX Advantage Realty in Maryland, talks about handling FSBO’s, expireds and past customers — and how having a positive attitude can have a huge impact on your business.

For Sale By Owners have been a huge part of his business over the past 10 years. He got started by taking Mike Ferry training courses, and still uses those practices today. Although 33% of his business comes from HomeGain, the remaining portion comes from FSBO’s, expireds and past customers.

He says his advice to working with FSBO’s is simple. What is it?

BONUS: During this call Eric provides a “phone script” that makes it easy to call up potential new clients!

Listen to the HomeGain Radio Clip (approx 14 minutes):

Eric Pakulla was the first real estate agent to earn one million dollars from AgentEvaluator (home buyer and seller leads) and is nearing the two million dollar mark, and has been the Nationwide HomeGain Top Performer since 2005.

Listen to more HomeGain Radio calls.

Sue Kwon of CBS News recently interviewed Matt Everett of GoAutoAds.com about automobile advertising in the Bay Area. Since HomeGain is a client of GoAutoAds, Max, the HomeGain gorilla (as shown on the side of a truck below on one of several “Max Mobiles” that have driven around the country) received a feature shot during the interview that aired on television in multiple cities and states across the U.S. including Wisconsin, Florida, Los Angeles, San Diego (just aired today) and more cities to come!

Watch the TV interview on CBS.com

More Max Citings on the HomeGain Real Estate Blog

Max Mobile Wins Best Decal Award

See Max Photo Gallery

With over 400 million people using Facebook, you start to recognize how important it is to have your business brand on Facebook. For real estate, a business fan page is critical, but the fact is, most real estate professionals do not utilize the features and functionality of the page to the best of their ability.

One of the most important things you can do extend your brand on Facebook is to use the FBML application to create a custom look for your page.

Add a custom welcome page and/or IDX search page by adding the FBML application.

Landing on a Facebook “wall” is just boring. It is a wall of information that really doesn’t give people the full picture of your real estate business.

And let’s face it, most of the real estate content out there is somewhat boring, so create a custom Welcome page that uses proven conversion psychology to call visitors to action to fan your page and push over to your website and lead generators.

See the Arbour Realty example here on the right (and notice the new tab to the right of Wall and Info called “Welcome”). Here are my 2 real estate specific templates. See another real estate FBML example. Here is a live demo for you to view as an example.

Include a brief bio, all your contact information and call to actions to your lead generation tools like property search, market reports, contact form and even community profiles. Resources for buyers and sellers would also be helpful.

Disclaimer:

For Technical Information (Templates): You MUST have some knowledge of HTML and CSS (box model table-less design) in order to properly customize these templates. You will want to host images on your own server or a service like Photobucket. You will also want to include at least 250 words of keyword rich text, add ALT tags to images and keyword rich anchor text into any links for SEO purposes as Facebook Fan Pages are fully indexed by Google. You will also need to use this tutorial to fix an outstanding bug Facebook introduced in IE8 which requires you to load the CSS externally.
Tutorial: Fix to Facebook’s CSS Issues with Internet Explorer 8
All Tutorials: Tutorial Category
Video Tutorials: All Videos.
Size of templates conform to new Facebook business page size requirements of 520 pixels.

Tutorial: Continue reading this post