I am not a top Realtor in my market, nor am I seasoned veteran.  However, I am finally at a point where I understand the business of real estate and its complex, ever challenging nature.  Real estate is not a career for people with limited resources. 

Starting a real estate career is no different than starting a new business.  The main reason that small business start ups fail is lack of proper funding and resources. 

I have looked at the careers of several highly successful agents and have found some common threads. 

Many of them were rooky of the year when they started. 

Most of them had “sponsorship” from someone who was in a position to help them build their success.  By sponsorship I mean that there was a person of influence who could essentially feed them a continuous pool of clients.  It might be a family member who worked at a corporation that was moving employees to the area, a broker in charge who was giving them relocation clients, Continue reading this post

I had a conversation with a new client for about 20 minutes on the phone the other night and about half way through he revealed to me that he has been looking at houses for the last 6 months, but, could not understand why real estate agents would stop contacting him after showing several homes.

Three agents had the opportunity to sell this buyer a home and would have, except they did not want to show him more than 10 houses to make it happen.

Perplexed? Amazed?

Really, I’m still not sure what I feel after having this conversation, but, one thing I did know was that I was going to find him a home and close the transaction. In a time where many real estate professionals are struggling to make ends meet, I simply cannot understand the mentality that many agents have.

Maybe it’s the water that we can drink at the cooler in the office or maybe many agents are simply demoralized after looking at their shrinking bank accounts and rising credit card balances. Either way, once we get an opportunity to work with a pre-qualified buyer who will buy a home, we need to make it happen.

Maybe the difference for some agents and teams who are successful today is that they seize the opportunity when presented while others just want things to fall in their lap – unwilling to work hard enough to make a deal happen.

If I could just offer a simple recommendation in what is generally a tough real estate market: seize every opportunity presented. Do whatever it takes. Continue reading this post

As a guy who does search engine marketing, I believe in testing. I test a lot.

During a typical week, I will visit quite a few real estate websites. This past week, I took the opportunity while visiting them to “Mystery Shop” 50 of them. I was not mystery shopping to see who had the prettiest website or the coolest interface, or the most search criteria.

I was simply registering with my name, phone number and email address to see who called me back first. This post is a BASIC report of what I found.

(Note: I am going to do a more detailed study on many more sites in about 2 months for publication – if you would like a copy of that study, shoot me an email! – it should be out in December / January and I would be happy to share it with you. It is going to not only include how quickly people responded, but HUNDREDS of examples of their responses as well).

Out of the 50 real estate websites that I registered for, I did not receive a callback or contact at all on 27 of them. (I was STUNNED at that one.) Nine of them called me back within two hours. By the end of 24 hours Continue reading this post

I consider myself very fortunate. I’m happily married with a very successful real estate career that is growing rapidly in a tough market.

Prior to beginning my real estate career, I was a restaurant manager looking to find a career where I could actually pursue something that I cared about and had passion for. I was already buying, rehabbing and selling homes so it was a natural transition to move into the listing and sales side of the business. Furthermore, working on those houses helped to provide a foundation that was more beneficial to selling real estate than any class that I ever took in college.

In October of 2003, my wife, Samantha, was diagnosed with breast cancer. Three days after the diagnoses, my wife looked at me and said “let’s buy a house”. It was the spirit that “not even cancer can stop us from realizing our dream” that still inspires me today to dream, work, strive and believe that nothing can stop the human spirit that has the strength to believe in themselves in the face of what can be the worst possible set of circumstances anyone can face – their own death.

Three years later, our daughter was born – the beauty and miracle that many take for granted was to us, almost a miracle. The chances that we could have a child were slim and many thought not possible. But the cancer battle and newborn child left us in less than great shape financially and the time I had spent caring for my wife emptied my pipeline of business and I was wondering if real estate was going to be a viable option for me and my family.

That’s when I made a fundamental paradigm shift into the online world – the “new” way of real estate, so to speak. Continue reading this post

I have noticed that in almost all sales – Real Estate is no exception – salespeople tend to have up and down cycles in their sales stream. Most just attribute this to luck but I think there is more to it than that. I think they work hard to create leads and then when they are working the leads they stop generating new ones.

This creates a cycle where leads are generated, then there are sales, then there’s a down period, and the cycle begins again. In my opinion, it is important to cut out the down periods by continually creating new leads and improving all systems.

It seems that the same type scenario occurs in all phases of our business. Whether we are working on leads, systems, or marketing. We get motivated and work hard to generate or improve and then we cycle into a sloppy phase.

So…my question is how do we stay motivated to continually improve our lead generation techniques, systems, marketing, etc.?

Here are some ideas to stay in the groove: Continue reading this post

As most of you know, I have been offering my help to HomeGain members and others to help them accomplish their Real Estate goals by maximizing the Internet. It’s been very rewarding to me knowing that I have helped many of you who now are earning a nice income by using the Internet. This actually isn’t for those people.

About half the Agents and Brokers that have contacted me for help have actually done nothing to further their Internet programs. I can’t keep track of everyone, but I do keep track of many by going back to their websites to see if they have made the recommended changes. At least 50% haven’t made any changes and are continuing to follow the “Old School” Real Estate model.

You know the one; you hope that someone recommends someone to use you. Or maybe someone will call on one of the magazine ads you spend $500-$1000 per month to receive 5 – 10 calls. ($1,000 on the Internet is 150-200 leads or 3-4 or more sales) Those are some expensive calls…especially when they just wanted to know the price and hung up on you!

Yup, I know you know what I’m talking about!

Ok, so what is Paradigm Paralysis? Let’s tell you a little story so you understand. Continue reading this post