Wow…
Category: Real Estate (page 44 of 266)
“Sessions said they trusted their real estate agent, who, she claimed, told them the snake problem was “made up” by the previous owners so that they could leave their mortgage behind. He assured them that every precaution was made to keep the snakes away, she said.
The Sessions’ signed paperwork acknowledging the stories about snakes when they bought the house, based upon the assurances the stories were false, The Associated Press reported.”
The above video is getting thousands of views – best we can tell it’s at 2500 but as is their norm, youtube stops it at key points and it catches up later. Anyway, we’re in the top 50 for nonprofit today.
If you guys can – and we hope you can – it would be truly great if you’d visit that and comment on it. Comments are a currency yotubue loves.
I’ve been having periodic, kinda sorta regular conversations with a young real estate agent in the southwest. It’s been goin’ on for maybe a year or more. He thinks he has a very bright future, but from where I sit, he hasn’t yet grasped just how really good he’s destined to be.
He’s a goal setter, yet he’s not hit his goals the last few years. Don’t get me wrong, he’s done very well. But missin’ his goals consistently isn’t from poor work ethic, he’s like a Nebraskan corn farmer at harvest time. The guy’s relatively tech savvy as he maintains his own websites, which are designed to be lead generators. He has an IDX etc. Still, goals not met.
He works his ass off, gets referrals up the ying-yang, follows up, crosses his T’s, dots his I’s, loves his mom, and eats his veggies. So what’s the hold up for Heaven’s sake? What’s been missing?
95% (Pulled out of the clean, breezy San Diego blue sky.) of real estate agents who don’t make it, fail for this reason.
Promise you won’t roll your eyes.
Bottom line? He stopped spending so much time with websites, and other various marketing tasks, and began spending most of his time either prospecting or, you know, being belly to belly with folks who could tell him to go to hell. Turns out a buncha folks attached to said bellies haven’t been giving him directions to Satan’s abode.
Go figure.
His income this year will most likely eclipse last year’s goal by about 30% or more — a goal he failed to reach. Puttin’ it another way, If he reaches this year’s goal, and he’s ‘this close’ to being on target, he’ll have exceeded last year’s actual income by approximately 55-70%. All this by simply parkin’ his belly in front of more stranger’s bellies than ever before.
Who’d a thunk?
Oh, and for the record, so far this year his ‘high tech’ lead generators have produced a tad less than 20% of his income. The dominating majority of what he’s accomplished has been using methods available when Truman was in Read more
I’ve had a string of successes lately. May will mark the end of the 7th month of growing income. In a row. For a salesperson that surfs the payables (thanks, Greg for that phrase), it’s a joy to be there. I’m also cheating: October was the most brutally bad month I’ve had- it might have been $500.00 net, and it took till January or Feb to recover from that.
I’ve hardly “arrived,” during this time I’ve put on about 17 pounds (despite going to the gym pretty regularly – the battle at the dinner table has been met poorly by me, and that changes Wednesday with a physician supervised 90 day commitment with a variant of the Paleo diet.) I’m on the cusp of paying the monster IRS debt that I acquired in my 20’s. On the cusp means July to those scoring at home.
My wife has suffered from the madness of depression during this time (something I’ve struggled with, and it’s true madness), and there are the usual excuses and resistances that exist. But I’ve done stuff to compensate for the Resistance. And I’m sharing this with you.
I’m also gonna say that I’ve doubled my income and left about 25% of my “hours worked” behind. I am working harder, when I’m working, and making a deliberate effort to refresh myself at the wellspring (more on that in a bit).
In any case, let’s talk about the “how” behind this. A series of simple change that, taken together, have made for profound growth. This year will have a higher income than last year. These habits- below- are why. Each could get a bigger blog post or treatment.
Daily Read: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. I read about 3-5 pages from this each day. I’m a believer in Christ. Still the way that this is laid out speaks to me, Scriptures for my thinking and has changed my behavior. To the point: I don’t have prickly little testy spats with people because I leave them to most of their own bullshit. I can ignore much, easily. I don’t need to inform the Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
…this is how business might be done:
You (a willing home seller) would look for a real estate agent and discover that the government mandates that you hire, its delegated agent, to market and negotiate on your behalf. That chosen agent will be the only one who can deal with potential buyers and will select which offer you should consider, among the many offers available. The agent presents the offer, to which you suggest a counter-offer or refusal.
In this hypothetical example, the agent tells you that you don’t have the option to counter and reminds you that you have a binding contract with her as an exclusive agent; she says “Take the ‘reasonable’ offer or suffer the consequences”. Obviously, you don’t think that’s fair and want to test the free market. You might consider another real estate agent because you don’t think she’s negotiating on your behalf.
Rather than allow you to pursue your own course of action, the real estate agent accuses you of “agent busting”. She sets up a picket line, in front of your home, with big signs proclaiming you to be “evil” or responsible for “unfair tactics”, or “greedy”. She turns away all potential buyers of the home by calling them “scabs” and proclaiming that a reasonable enough offer was on the table and you were just an evil, greedy agent buster.
She might convince the power company to sever your electricity, phone and internet. She might try to prevent the grocery store, pizza delivery guy, landscapers, and pool maintenance guy from servicing you, per your standing contract with them. Finally, she might try to restrict your income by hampering your ability to work .
You’re a tough cookie, though. It’s your home. You bought it, improved it, kept it clean, and want the best price a willing buyer might pay you. You hold out, regardless of the wacky protesters, bused in from out-of-town, screaming at you, your children, your neighbors, and anyone who might dare speak with Read more
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
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
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:
- Your legal rights.
- Can you be required to belong to a union and to pay union dues?
- How to resign your union membership.
- How to stop your union from using your money against you.
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.
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
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.
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?
I appeared by videoconference at the National Association of Realtors Association Executives convention in March. At the time, I made note of my remarks in a comment to Teri Lussier’s first post on the NAR’s latest anti-consumer money-grab:
I spoke by videoconference to the NAR Association Executives conclave on Monday. I held nothing back, patiently explaining to them that legislation is crime — using force to induce an outcome that would not have occurred without the imposition of force.
I explained that a legislature can do nothing in a free market except harm, and that the American economy is by now essentially a vast mutual-vampirism cult: Each one of is sucking the lifeblood out of his neighbor’s neck, and each one of us is being sucked dry by his next neighbor. Taking a death-grip on the obvious, I patiently explained that this cannot but result in pandemic disaster.
Instead, I said, if the National Association of Realtors were to come to be as zealous about private property rights as the National Rifle Association is about firearms ownership rights, I would be proud to call myself a member.
As you might expect, the reaction was subdued.
Bob Bemis, CEO of ARMLS, intimated to me that there is video of the presentation somewhere, but I have not seen this. But yesterday there came by snail-mail a three-page evaluation of the event.
I think it would be fair to say that I made an impression. I knew going in that I would be telling them exactly what they did not want to hear, so I have to commend the people who made comments for their forbearance of my effrontery.
Here’s my take: What they don’t want to hear is precisely what they need most to hear. It’s not reflected in the evaluation, but a very important idea I took up with them is this one:
What happens if someone comes along and resolves to do real estate brokerage for free?
I’ve pointed out many times that Zillow’s “make me move” feature is brokerage: The introduction of buyer to seller. This is not affected by the real estate regulation machine since the act of Read more
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
I got an iPad 2 Friday, my spiff for hitting my earnings goal ($1,000 per day, if you’re keeping score at home) in April. The dogs have written a ton about the iPad since its introduction, and my plan is to write a ton more as I get used to this little box.
Here’s my deal: How can I make a grand a day every month? How can I push that up to five grand a day? I’m on the move all the time. And I’m tethered to my desk all the time. And I need a way of reconciling that contradiction.
My MacBook went a long way toward dealing with this problem — and may the lord rain his blessings down upon Ronald MacDonald and all the other providers of free WiFi linkage. But a laptop wants too many resources to be universally useful.
How so? If I’m away from free-WiFi-land, I need to plug in an air card and wait for it to initialize. Not only that, I need a flat surface, and I need to give the laptop itself time for house-keeping. Plus which, I always need to nurse the battery, which makes me reluctant to use it for blue-sky purposes, for fear I’ll be powerless to deal with mission-critical problems later on. Still worse, I have to schlep the damn thing around — which makes it much too easy to leave behind.
The iPad takes away all of those problems:
- WiFi plus 3G means instant-on internet virtually everywhere.
- I can actually use it in my lap in my car — without moving to the passenger seat.
- Ten hours of in-use battery life leaves me at little risk of running out of power — and the two iPhone power cables I already have in my car will both fit the iPad, as well.
- And the iPad is almost too easy to carry: The size and weight of a magazine.
All that’s great, but it’s not as if the iPad does not introduce complications of its own. I’ll be going through everything in detail as I integrate the new machine into my praxis, but I’ll touch on a Read more