It’s a typical scenario: you get an email from a couple wanting to see a home. Adrenaline surges as a closing check flits across your mind. You eagerly set up an appointment, drive across town, show the property at the appointed hour then set up another appointment to show them more homes on the weekend.

Friday comes and you get an email with 17 MLS numbers they’d like to see. A small gnawing feeling starts working at corner of your stomach as you realize you need to do some educating. You dive into the list and quickly discover that 14 of them are short sales that can be shown by appointment only. That uncomfortable feeling in your tummy is expanding into a minor digestive disorder as you get ready to start making the calls to set up the appointments.

I could go on with scenarios all too common for too many REALTORS® … ending with the unreturned calls, failure to respond to emails and finally the devastating realization that the clients you’ve been carting around for the past three months have just purchased a home from another agent at an open house.

You’ve just been managed.

From the first moment you come in contact with a prospective client, they have expectations. In many cases, these expectations are not based on reality: they’ve been garnered from conversations with their friends, reading posts on sites like HomeGain, Zillow and Trulia and by watching HGTV. Often, their expectations are way out of alignment with reality. It’s up to you to manage their expectations and direct them forward in a positive manner. You’d think it would be easy, yet statistics state that by the time a buyer gets to you, they’ve already been in contact with numerous other Realtors. How do you get this food chain to stop with you?

Bottom line: if you don’t mange your buyers, they will manage you. Right out of business.

In reality, I’ve discovered that most buyers want to be “managed.” Used in the right context, the word “manage” is a good thing. Continue reading this post

We’ve all heard it; “real estate is local”. I’m not so sure.

I believe that all of the different “local” real estate markets are in fact intertwined with one another. While there is not much value in a national average or median real estate price, there is value in national sales volume, national inventory levels and other national housing statistics.

Think of them as a barometer - a measure by which you can assess your local market. Perhaps your market is selling more homes on average at a higher price point than the national average. Perhaps it’s less. Either way, national market statistics matter. You can use this information as part of a general wellness test of your local market. Not to mention that what actually is happening in other local real estate markets can directly affect what happens in your local market.

We in fact just ran into a scenario where a client of ours could only buy a home at a certain price here because the home he owns in Michigan cannot sell for a reasonable price there. They wanted to spend about $600,000, but, bought for $250,000 until the home in Michigan can sell. This is an example of exactly how these markets are intertwined and why in fact real estate is not all local.

To truly understand your local market, you must stay abreast of and understand more than just your neighborhood, town and city market statistics lest someone else who does understand will be the “local expert” instead of you. Continue reading this post

Yesterday I was perusing online through my cell phone bill. I took note that my two teenagers ages 15 and 17 had sent and received over 10,000 text messages – in December.

The two adults in the home sent and received approximately 400 text messages this month -– mostly between the aforementioned teenaged children. Sometimes it seems like I text them more often than I talk to them.

This got me to wondering about the future of communicating in the real estate industry.

As I write this, I’m looking at an email inbox containing 5,586 messages. Lousy email management skills aside, this is an indication of how often I send and receive emails. As I look into my sent mail folder, I see that I have sent an average of 11.33 emails each day this month. These are emails sent from Continue reading this post

Let me start by saying that for the longest time, I was TOTALLY against “forced registration” (requiring visitors to provide their contact information before viewing the MLS). I not only did not force registration on our brokerage website, but I also wrote about why others should not do it either. In short, I was firmly planted in the “that’s a bad thing to do” camp.

Over time, I softened my position somewhat, when people would tell me that they were having success with it. I still would never do it, but I could not argue with their success.

First, Morgan Carey at RealEstateWebmasters.com told me that I needed to at least try it. Great. Nope. I still would not budge. In my heart, I thought that asking folks for their information

a) was unfriendly

b) it would drive traffic to competitor sites

c) would lower the quality of the lead

d) would result in more obscene emails from unhappy visitors

e) and any increase in # of registrations would be offset with an overall net loss in closings…well, you get the idea (grin).

As more and more people started reporting to me their successes (an example was Wayne Long, who was kind enough to share exactly what was happening on his site with me), I finally decided to TRY it. The folks that I visited with at the REW conference were helpful as well. Almost all of them had already made the transition.

How did it go?

Here are the results:

Continue reading this post

We have had a lot of positive changes to our MLS system recently.

We use MRIS (Metropolitan Regional Information System). There have been quite a few additions to our drop down menus. You can now choose short sales and foreclosures in a home search. We have had quite an interest from home buyers that feel they are getting a great value with these type of sales.

MRIS has also added features such as a highlighted banner in the remarks section. Here we can boast the best features of the home, and it will catch the attention of other agents. We also have the capability to relist a home after it has been off the market for at least 90 days and the total days on market starts over at zero.

In the past we had to wait 6 months for a property to be relisted to start with zero days on market. This benefits the seller tremendously if they want to take a few months off and then relist their property. We have a fairly new feature of virtual earth map which gives you the option of a birds eye view or aerial view of the property. Continue reading this post

Most real estate agents today are inundated with emails from other agents advertising their new listings. Some days I’ll get 20-30 of these emails and another 10 or so directly to my spam folder. I wish they would all go to my spam folder because that is exactly what they are – spam.

Just for reference, let’s take a look and remember what the definition of spam is when referring to email solicitations. I’m sure they believe these to be a great use of the “new technology” known as email, but, really it’s nothing more than spam.

As agents, we already have all of these listings available for home buyers in the MLS and that does nothing to mention that buyers can find these great new listings and reduced properties simply by searching through the MLS on agent websites, broker websites, realtor.com, and all of the other 3rd party aggregator websites where buyers are searching for homes.

If I receive them, I immediately unsubscribe myself from this innovative use of spam, er, technology. The biggest reason for this is the fact that they are non-targeted to me and my market and the sheer volume makes it impractical for me to try to keep them in my mind.

Since I’m receiving so many of these emails on a daily basis, how can any agent possibly believe that I am interested in looking at this unsolicited regurgitated information from the MLS listings posted in these emails?

On listing appointments, I specifically tell my potential clients that we do not communicate with agents via spam, er, new listing emails because they are ineffective and a tool only used by agents who don’t actually understand how to effectively utilize technology to market listings to agents and directly to buyers.

Let me offer some solutions to effectively utilize some of the real new technologies to help market homes for sale rather than sending bulk messages to people who don’t need the information. Continue reading this post