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Category: Group Therapy (page 42 of 81)

May 17, 2011

Upping your game selling real estate implies selling enough that you can add the staff to sell even more. For me, that means concentrating on the prospects who will make it to the closing table.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is a response to Robert Worthington’s post on getting to the next level selling real estate.

I don’t want to represent myself as an expert on production, this for two reasons:

First, because I know that is untrue. I’m a good real estate agent, and I think I’m becoming a good salesman. But if I stand on my tippy-toes, I can almost see over the nap of the carpet. I’m thinking there might a be a world up there.

And second, because I hate it when other people do it. It’s grating when they actually can ride the bull and nauseating when I find out that they can’t — that they’re all hat and no cattle.

With that as a caveat, I have some observations.

Here are three ways to net more income from your working hours:

1. Close more houses at your current gross commission income.

2. Close the same number of houses at a higher GCI.

3. Cut your costs.

Obviously, number 3 works great no matter what else you do, provided that cutting your costs doesn’t cut your production along with it. Marketing is what you communicate, not what you say, and half-assed marketing is worse than no marketing.

Scott Gaertner, a long-time friend of BloodhoundBlog and one of the highest-grossing/highest-netting agents I know, has urged us to pursue plan number 2. I want to do this, and I really, really want for Cathleen to do this, but the time is not propitious for listing luxury homes. In Phoenix — as in Florida, I expect — the inventory consists of lender-owned homes, short sales and the rare, and almost always over-priced, equity sale. I’ll talk about these categories further down, but the bottom line is that, for now, we don’t have either the cash or the resources to pursue the rare motivated equity seller. We can’t afford to acquire that client, and we really can’t afford to fail to close the sale.

I have a lot of respect for plan number 1, because I am a high-D. I like to get things done, and the more things I get done, better and faster, the happier I am in Read more

May 16, 2011

The goal of 1k/day, aging, and passion – Here it goes

by

Realtor, Guerilla Technologist

Author website

I’m going to turn 30 in september.  I wonder to this day, when will my real estate business take off?  I see wildy successful people like Russell Shaw.  I even see Greg Swann’s goal of 1k a day.  Truthfully, I wish I was up to $200 a day.  The game is hard in Florida, but that’s why I’m in the fight, it’s a challenge filled with some heart ache and infinite fun.  So far this year, I’ve made a decent wage, but nothing to brag about.  I have kids and a stay at home wife, so you do the math.  I’ve always said to myself, if I could just be self employed and pay the bills, I’ll have it made.

I wake up some days and do the typical routine and think, how on Earth can I hit it big in this business.  Where’s my break going to come in.  I work literally 7 day’s a week.  Yet my fellow bloodhounder Greg Dallaire works 30 hours a week and is averaging $500 a day.  I ask myself, where has my business plan failed?  Well it hasn’t failed, but it’s not where I want to be.  I’m doing something wrong and I don’t know what it is.  I don’t want to work the rest of my life 7 days a week and make $200 a day.

What have you done in your business to take it to the next level?  Oh I know, times are tough, but lets face it, I’m doing something wrong and not talking to enough people is what it comes down to.  I need to be better at generating leads and handling them properly.  So how can I get there.  SEO blah blah, I’m doing it everyday and yes it’s paid off.  I suck at recruiting agents.  How do I recruit agents?

You see, I have a great wife, great kids, I sleep good at night, and I even love real estate, it’s a beautiful thing; but I want the beautiful real estate thing to be like Miss America.  I want to step it up.

1)Can someone please help a fellow bloodhounder Read more

May 14, 2011

The bad news? The NAR’s #rppsi scam passed, despite overwhelming opposition. The good news? The NAR is now a labor union, complete with forced political speech. Let the Right-to-Work lawsuits begin!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The National Association of Realtors’ bloodsuckers’ survival initiative (#rppsi) passed this morning, even though only the bloodsucking Babbitts themselves are in favor if it.

Now the NAR will have even more money to “protect homeownership” with bloodsucking legislation like the Community Reinvestment Act, the Government Sponsored Entities laws, the first-time home-buyer tax credit, etc.

The NAR plans to “protect homeownership” until every last one of us is living in a cardboard box.

That’s a bad thing — bad for the people who voted for it, since crime is always self-destructive. But bad for us, too, since we now have that much more to apologize for.

Here’s the silver lining: The NAR is now arguably a labor union. Membership is forced for most Realtors to gain access to the MLS. And #rppsi is beyond all doubt forced political speech: You will have no control over the $40 a year that is to be extracted from you. If you don’t despise Barney Franks, there’s something wrong with you, but your money will be going to that petulant thug like it or don’t.

If you are lucky enough to live in one of the 22 Right-to-Work states, you may have recourse in the courts. Here are some apposite links from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation:

The NAR has been a vampire latched onto the neck of the American body politic since its founding. It does not exist to “protect homeownership.” Its sole reason for existence is to despoil American consumers to the benefit of real estate brokers: To steal money from the people who earned it, diverting it to a conspiracy of bloodsucking vampires. Today’s vote was the first step in the process of eliminating this pestilence from our lives forever.

May 14, 2011

The Power of Not Knowing… and Other Meaningful Ideas

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

Over the past couple of articles from the POPs Program for Agents, the emphasis has been on the first, key step in creating a balanced, successful life as a real estate agent: staying in the present.  The article on Temporal Awareness showed us that the past (guilt) and the future (fear) don’t actually exist.  It also discussed the emotional response we have over words that don’t exist.  And in The Mirror Effect, one of the most powerful concepts for creating true and lasting happiness, we learn that even someone being hurtful, doesn’t exist.  Are you starting to recognize a pattern here?

Nothing Exists!
No, no, that’s not what I’m suggesting.  The pattern is this: We Don’t Know The Meaning… of Anything.  As a matter of fact, I will take it one step further: We Assign Meaning… to Everything.  This is especially prevalent in the Sales and Services professions, where interaction with others is so integral to what we do.  We think we know what we’re seeing; possibly a “hot” new client, for instance:

 

Only to discover later how child-like are their expectations and decisions:

 

Time to Celebrate
At first, this idea that we don’t know the meaning of anything may seem a bit scary, but I suggest to you quite the opposite; this is actually cause for celebration!  Two reasons:

  • Not Knowing the Meaning = Freedom
  • Assigning Meaning = Power

When we admit, especially to ourselves, that we don’t know the meaning of events in our world, we become free to stop labeling those events as “good” and “bad”.  There’s a terrific line in the poem IF, by Rudyard Kipling:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster,
and treat those two Impostors just the same; 

Realizing we don’t know, means freedom from all kinds of pressure.  The pressure to be disappointed, fearful, regretful and yes, even happy.  Sometimes the greatest pressure we know, is to put a happy face on something labeled “good” when in our hearts, we’re not feeling it at all.

As great as the freedom of not knowing is, it pales in comparison to the power of assigning meaning.  Think about how often this power can affect your life, and how much more success you Read more

May 13, 2011

Senator Rand Paul: The claim of a “right” to health care implies a belief in slavery.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Say what you will about the Tea Party, it’s a small victory just to have words like these enunciated on the floor of Congress:

This is Ayn Rand from Atlas Shrugged making the same argument:

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control some years ago,” said Dr. Hendricks. “Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I could not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything — except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it. That a doctor should have any right, desire or choice in the matter, was regarded as irrelevant selfishness; his is not to choose, they said, but ‘to serve.’ That a man’s willing to work under compulsion is too dangerous a brute to entrust with a job in the stockyards — never occurred to those who proposed to help the sick by making life impossible for the healthy. I have often wondered at the smugness at which people assert their right to enslave me, to control my work, to force my will, to violate my conscience, to stifle my mind — yet what is it they expect to depend on, when they lie on an operating table under my hands? Their moral code has taught them to believe that it is safe to rely on the virtue of their victims. Well, that is the virtue I have withdrawn. Let them discover the Read more

May 11, 2011

More thrilling real estate math from the National Association of Realtors: How much did first-time home-buyers benefit from their $8,000 tax-funded subsidy? Can you count to negative $15,000?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

You read that right. On average, recipients of the $8,000 federal housing subsidy lost $15,000 on the homes they purchased using the subsidy as their incentive.

From SmartMoney.com:

The government’s recent $8,000 cash incentive for first-time home buyers has proved even more costly for recipients than for taxpayers, according to data released Monday. Typical buyers have lost twice as much to price declines as they received from the program.

The median home value fell to about $170,000 in March from $185,000 a year earlier, according to Zillow.com. That means a buyer who closed on a house just before the tax-credit program expired in April 2010 collected $8,000 but has since lost $15,000 in value. Those who bought earlier in the program have done worse; the median price is down $20,000 from March 2009.

This was all completely foreseeable, of course. The only person, seemingly, who cannot grasp simple economics is Barrack Obama, temporarily president of the United States. But don’t get the idea that Obama is done wrecking the housing market just yet. Even now, his minions are pushing for still more sub-prime mortgages to economically-unqualified home-buyers.

As the great Tom Waits said, “I don’t have a drinking problem — except when I can’t get a drink.” America doesn’t have a housing problem. The problem is that, despite the state’s (mis)education monopoly, there are still too many people who can suss out a hustle, if you give them enough time.

May 11, 2011

What’s the long term investment value of owning your own home? Would you believe… nothing?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Business Insider has the goods.

Yes, I know you can tell me stories about killings made. We’ve done it, too. How are your results lately?

Meanwhile, do you want to have a long talk with all those folks who bought their homes believing in the wealth-producing miracle of the mortgage-interest tax deduction?

Does anyone want to chip in for some wood polish for the NAR’s nose?

May 10, 2011

Any Chance You’re Holding A Fun-House Mirror?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

So what do you see when you look in the mirror?  No doubt as a real estate agent the way you present yourself is important, but is that all you see?  In a standard mirror, maybe it is.  “Let’s see: short sleeve, button down shirt with yellow plaid design: check.  Power red necktie, wide, hanging half way down my ample belly: check.  Name tag with alphabet soup of certifications, right side up and cleaned of (most of) last night’s pasta sauce: check.  Roger Rocket – real estate superman – reporting for duty.”  But seriously, there are other kinds of mirrors you know…

A Look Back…?
Last week, in my article on Temporal Awareness, I talked a little about how past and present do not actually exist.  I used the example of someone saying something about us behind our backs – the visceral reaction, the anger – only to discover they never said anything!  We cause ourselves stress over things that never exist.  We create realities and emotions over events that never happen.  These responses can, however, be turned into a wonderful tool.  And by “wonderful” I mean a gut-wrenching look at what’s inside of us that we are desperately trying to hide from both the outside world and ourselves.  That kind of wonderful.

The Mirror Effect
The Mirror Effect is a way to recognize what’s happening and take a peek at what’s causing our emotional response.  It also helps us stay in the present.  (Though, truth be told, you have to be present enough to engage The Mirror Effect in the first place.)  Suppose someone said something hurtful to you – an observation – that you knew in your heart to be inaccurate.  For example: “Sean, you were never the athlete you like to think you were.”  Our reaction to that would be pretty subdued; we might even chuckle a little.  Why?  In my example, because I know who I am in that realm; I know what I accomplished and even how I ranked.  I’ve accepted the changes that come with moving past one’s athletic prime, but that does not diminish the truth of my vision.  When we are secure in this regard, comment means little and garners little reaction.

Now, let’s Read more

May 9, 2011

Brett Arends from the Wall Street Journal on Zillow’s morning gloom report: “All this bearish news makes me bullish.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Our friends at Zillow.com have figured out the secret to getting news coverage: Bad news:

Home values in the United States fell faster in the first quarter of 2011 than they have in any quarter since 2008, when the housing market experienced its worst performance, according to Zillow’s first quarter Real Estate Market Reports(1). The Zillow Home Value Index(2) fell 3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010 to the first quarter of 2011, and declined 8.2 percent year-over-year to $169,600. Home values have fallen 29.5 percent since they peaked in June 2006.

Negative equity reached a new high mark with 28.4 percent of single-family homeowners with mortgages underwater at the end of the first quarter, up from 27 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010. A homeowner is in negative equity when they owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth.

Meanwhile, foreclosures(3) rose throughout the first quarter as banks unfroze moratoriums and allowed foreclosures to resume. Foreclosures had fallen in late 2010 due to the slew of moratoriums brought about by the “robo-signing” controversy. In March, one out of every 1,000 homes in the country was lost to foreclosure.

With substantial home value declines, as well as increasing negative equity and foreclosures, Zillow forecasts show it is unlikely that home values will reach a bottom in 2011. First quarter data has prompted Zillow to revise its forecast, now predicting a bottom in 2012, at the earliest.

“Home value declines are currently equal to those we experienced during the darkest days of the housing recession. With accelerating declines during the first quarter, it is unreasonable to expect home values to return to stability by the end of 2011,” said Zillow Chief Economist Dr. Stan Humphries. “We did expect substantial payback from the homebuyer tax credits, which buoyed the housing market last year, but underlying demand post-tax credit, as well as rising foreclosures and high negative equity rates, make it almost certain that we won’t see a bottom in home values until 2012 or later.”

My own take is that we are at or near the knee in the curve: While supplies of fire-sale-priced homes Read more

May 6, 2011

Which home is the right one for you? Coldwell Banker says it’s the property for which Coldwell Banker will get paid double.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Is this home the right one for you and your family?

No, sorry. That’s an exclusive listing. Your trusty, ever-faithful Coldwell Banker broker won’t get paid if you buy that house.

So is this the perfect home for you?

Oh, no! This home has serious systemic defects, the worst of which is… it’s a fizzbo… Not only will there be no doughnuts at the closing table, your trusty, ever-faithful Coldwell Banker broker won’t get paid if you buy that house.

But this — this is the ideal home for you and your family:

Why? Because your trusty, ever-faithful Coldwell Banker broker will not only get paid, she’ll get paid double, once for suckering the seller into listing with Coldwell Banker and once more for suckering you into a dual agency.

Here’s the full clip:

When you say “yeah” you are conceding my argument. When you say “but” you are contradicting yourself. If this commercial is not a sleazy hustle, what is it?

May 4, 2011

MY SENIOR MOMENT

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

A couple of weeks ago I joined millions of other Americans in the last minute ritual of rushing to the post office on April 15th and filing… my tax extension.  Brimming with pride over not procrastinating this year, a reward was in order.  Now this is normally the realm of chocolate frozen yogurt, but I wanted something more appropriate, maybe even a little dangerous; so I went down to the local Tea Party Rally.

Though a newbie to the whole “Astroturf” experience, I felt I had some idea what to expect thanks to the fine, unbiased reporting of our main stream media.  I braced myself for loud, selfish people who didn’t give a damn about the less fortunate.  I girded myself for cynical young radicals.  I steeled myself for the subtle racism reportedly running just beneath the surface. In short, I entered the raucous Public Square of the Tea Party by embracing the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared.

Ha!  Somebody – I’m not sure if it’s the Boy Scouts or the Fourth Estate – owes me an apology.  I didn’t hear any loud, selfish rhetoric.  In fact, the speeches mainly concerned the social justice of liberty and even saving public employee pensions!  I did not see young radicals (though this was Oceanside, CA so distinguishing between subversive radicals and skateboarders is tricky).  And any “subtle racism” must have been drowned out by Ted Hayes’ standing ovation.

I spent hours looking out over the nearly two thousand people who attended, and it’s what I did see that surprised me: the predominate, if not prototypical, Tea Party activist is a woman in her early fifties who is, or soon will be, a grandmother.

Surprising, right?   I wasn’t prepared either.  (You see why I’m looking for an apology from the main stream media… or is it the Boy Scouts?)  The more I thought about it though, the more sense it made; who else would it be?  The Tea Party, at its heart, stands opposed to the generational transfer of financial devastation.  Now granted, parents are generally more protective of children than anyone else.  But most moms and dads Read more

May 2, 2011

Pieces of April for a morning in May: Set goals, attain them, record your progress, do better over time, repeat month-by-month.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I nailed down a house this morning at 6:50 am. It’s a hard dance to get the right house at the right price, but the world of email permits miracles to happen at any hour of the day or night.

We had a totally rockin’ April, more than three times our monthly nut. But the first check in April didn’t hit the bank until the 15th of the month, and, until this morning, we had zero dollars on the board for May. Even so, I told Cathleen that April 15th was our last day of poverty. We’ll see if that’s a prognostication I can defend.

Here’s a goal-getting calendar for May.

This is a simple procedure: Set goals, attain them, record your progress, do better over time, repeat month-by-month. It works. So get on it.

April 29, 2011

It’s About Time to Think About… Time

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

It’s time for me to apologize.  Some time back I introduced an idea – a set of ideas really – called the POPs Program, which I always meant to get back to it, but haven’t until today. So, to those of you who faithfully read my articles and were excited to learn more about the POPs Program, I am sorry.  I hope all four of you will forgive me…

In that Introduction, I discussed the autopilot that so often ends up running a great deal of our lives, and how diligent we must be to prevent it.  But it’s not easy, especially if you are a real estate agent!  One of the most common complaints I hear from agents is there’s not enough time in the day to get everything done.  Sound familiar?  Well be careful because that’s the beginning; that’s when we first begin to reach for the autopilot button.  Not on anything important – at least, not yet.  We turn it on to handle little things in our schedule; we allow it to help us move through a very busy week.  But tuning out is a slippery slope and eventually leads to the two great roadblocks of success: Guilt and Fear… and it all starts with Time.

Temporal Awareness is the great gift, and great curse, of sentient beings.  Unlike any other organism on this planet, we are aware of time as a line; we are cognizant of a past and a future.  This no doubt has served us well.  We know how to delay gratification, plan ahead and save.  We are adept at learning from mistakes, recognizing patterns and creating the possibility of a more successful future based on experiences of the past.  BUT (and you just knew there was a big “but” coming), this linear understanding of time is the seed of our undoing as well.

To understand this better, go with me on a quick, imaginary trip to the Serengeti plains of Africa where a tiger is chasing a gazelle… presumably for lunch.  The entire chase lasts less than a minute before both animals are exhausted and, in our happy little trip, the gazelle has escaped.  Do you know what happens next?  Nothing!  The tiger lays down to rest; Read more

April 23, 2011

Is Brian Brady the Easter Bunny?

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

No – he’s better.  Hey, do the Easter Bunny’s eggs tell us what the future has in store?  No, they just keep us busy looking for something that benefits us not at all.  Brian, on the other hand, is not only as sweet as candy, but he actually does give us a glimpse into what’s coming next.  He recently did it again.  This is a clip of Brian on a local television news show about two weeks ago.  Check out what he says around 1:50 into the clip.  If I didn’t know better, I’d say he just warned us that the US ability to borrow money – it’s credit worthiness – is in imminent danger.

And here, two weeks later, the Wall Street Journal reports on S&P’s decision to… downgrade their outlook on US creditworthiness from “Stable” to “Negative”.

If only we could impose on Brian to play a little Santa Claus next.  Maybe we’d all end up with more than an economic lump of coal in our stocking this year…

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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