Pomp and circumstance...

There's all kinds of real estate news we could link to. It's all bad news, as usual, but--who knows?--some of it might even be true. Too many sellers chasing too few buyers, bubbles bursting with a barely-audible hiss, starving Realtors sleeping on sidewalks and eating in soup kitchens. O, the humanity!

We could link to all that news, but our own purely local news puts the lie to all of it: We have been very busy, and our plan is to get a lot busier.

One of the ways we work to get busier is by working to get better educated. We're required to accumulate 24 hours of Continuing Education credits every two years. In practice, we do over 200 hours. Cathleen recently obtained her Graduate of the Realtor Institute designation. Both Greg and Cathleen just put in the classroom hours to qualify for the Accredited Buyer's Representative designation. This summer, we're both taking the classes for the E-Pro designation. Greg has completed the requirements for the Certified Residential Specialist designation.

We obtain all this extra education--it's not required, and it costs a good deal of time and money--in order to deliver a better standard of care to our clients. And the better we get at doing this job, the busier we get. Go figure...

CRS the hard way, with a little help from our friends...

Greg got the Certified Residential Specialist designation the hard way: All the classwork plus 75 transactions. Because we had to document the transactions, we learned some things about our business that we had known viscerally, but had never pinned down in numbers.

Greg spent his first two-and-a-half years as a licensee doing mostly rentals. Because of this, of the 75 homes he sold to qualify for the CRS designation, he sold all but eight in the last 29 months. Of those 67, over half are from referrals or repeat business. Six of them--plus several more still in process--can be attributed directly to one client, Ronan Doyle.

Ronan saw very early the kind of business we are striving to build, and he spread our story far and wide. He continues to do so, from faraway Boston, and we continue to grow on the strength of the work we did with him.

Here are two current listings we got because of work we did with Ronan:

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