by Cathleen Collins

Realtor, Staging Consultant

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As real estate professionals, our clients’/customers’ satisfaction with our service and the outcome of their transactions is unquestionably key to business success. In fact, I’d bet this has been true in every career you have ever had. It sure has been for me… beginning with my first jobs as babysitter, then as counter help at The Red Barn, and then throughout my various corporate positions in management, finance and information technology. Whether my customer has been internal, external, faceless or my very best friend, I’ve always done very well by doing very well for him and her.

And so it’s always been maddening for me to see someone or some organization fail to recognize that the “customer is always right,” or if the customer isn’t right to help the customer become right… at least to try to help. We all know the adage that a happy customer will tell someone else about his satisfactory experience, but an unhappy customer will tell the unhappy story ten times more often. Well, I want to tell you about great customer service that I was just the happy recipient of.

But first some background… It begins with Greg and me wanting to attract more clients than we were getting from reputation alone. Around the end of the amazing sellers’ market of 2004/2005, around the first anniversary of BloodhoundRealty.com, we hoped to jump-start our business by giving someone who didn’t know us personally (or through referral) a reason to believe that we put our clients’ interests above our own. We wanted to offer something more tangible than a motto or a sincere-looking pose. We were doing well when we took listings, but we were turning down more listings than we were accepting, because home owners, who didn’t yet know us, didn’t yet believe us that the buyers were no longer willing to pay top dollar. So we figured we would try to attract buyers by offering to let them keep their money in their pockets — money they would be paying the seller to pay to us. We thought that once we got this word out, we would Read more

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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I was at a party about 13 months ago, a going away party for one of my clients whose house we had just sold. I had sold the hostess her house, and somehow or another we started talking about 80/20 loans — nothing down financing. She had just refinanced to retire the second mortgage, so she had 20% equity in her home at next-to-nothing in out-of-pocket costs.

All around the room, people started nodding and saying 80/20, 80/20. They had all done the same thing, a room full of young homeowners with their homeownership made possible by the no-PMI piggy-back loan.

This is Peter Coy in Business Week’s Hot Property:

Is Your Mortgage Choking You?

For an article in BW, I’m looking to interview people who have subprime ARM mortgages and are feeling squeezed by resets.

A few weeks ago, Coy admitted that margins of error in statistical reporting render much of it meaningless. I have never worked with a sub-prime borrower, but I would expect that, among the stories of people being “choked,” there must also be stories of people who bought homes they would not otherwise have been able to purchase, homes they have subsequently refinanced with conforming loans.

“Proof by anecdote” is bogus in the first place, since anecdotes abound (and they’re much easier than real estate to improve). But surely there are countervailing anecdotes for almost any phenomenon. This might seem to argue for presenting “both sides” of the story. To me, it suggests a better approach. An anecdote in a news article is almost always a fallacious Appeal to Emotion dressed up as testimony. With two or three sad tales, the reporter implies that a situation that might be quite rare is in fact ubiquitous — and that the “solution” propounded requires no rational defense. Facts are facts, and surely thoughtful people can digest them without all that saccharine. Why not leave the anecdotes out altogether…?

Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing

by Russell Shaw

Mega-Producing Realtor

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Most of the national real estate sales trainers training today are selling worthless crap. Want proof? Buy their stuff and see if you can apply any of it and actually make your business better.

Most of the real estate magazine articles that are chock full of “what agents ought to be doing” are written by well intentioned people who either were never successful at selling real estate for a living or never did.

One of the most high profile agents in the world endlessly promotes that he will share (if you sign up for his fabulous training program) how he became so successful. He is quite successful and it would seem logical that he could share quite a bit that would help. One of the main things he “shares” is a cluttered looking clone website that you can buy from him. I’m not quite sure how that website helped him so much as he was fantastically successful before the internet existed.

One trainer (rhymes with fairy) knowingly lies from the stage.

Most agents who enter the business (13 out of 14 by actual count) will be gone in a year or two. Can that be changed by “learning about success”? I really doubt it, as most of them didn’t have much commitment to ever really apply themselves. But that doesn’t include everyone – there are a LOT of people in the real estate business who want to do better and aren’t sure what to do next.

I’m planning on doing something about that. Over the years I have figured out what is involved – exactly – to go from “0 – 60” and I also know what is not involved. We are going to make that information broadly available. Free. Free, in the sense that we won’t be charging any money for any of it. Period. We won’t be endlessly attempting to get new people to listen to the audio or watch the videos because it makes us more money. Our only goal will be to see Read more