Here is the best-kept secret about finding new listing leads.

Most agents know what to do when a customer fills out a CMA request on his website (or calls to ask for one). The problem is that those are few and far between. Right? Right. Another concern is that most sellers who ask you for a home valuation also ask several other agents at the same time.
Why do you think that you always seem to be competing with other agents on …

A good friend of mine, Frances Flynn Thorsen,, is currently working with members of the Arizona Foreclosure Coalition.
They have designed a survey to determine the temperature of the housing crisis.
Please click on the link in the actual blog post (link doesn’t work in this headline box) to go to the survey on ActiveRain. Many thanks for your time to help Frances and her team get quality results.
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Imagine what it would be like to be the top listing agent in your market. What if you got to the office and did nothing but talk to sellers and negotiate sales? What if you actually listed two or three homes every week, without fail?
I know it sounds like a lot of listings, and it is, but think of the freedom you’d have! And if only half of those listings were to sell, (which, by the way, is the national average) …

You have to solve the lead problem first.
Allow me to tell you a fishing story. A real estate fairy tale, if you will. Once upon a time there was a huge river, stocked full of home-buyer and home-seller fish. All along the banks of that river were REALTORS® with their fishing poles. Everyone was catching all he wanted, and life was good.
Then one day, way upstream, a big commercial fishing company set up operations, with its computerized fish finders, its power nets, …

See the ad…on the right sidebar?
We’ve all been logged into Facebook and then off to the right of our page seen one of those little “sponsored ads”, right?  They are often times things or services that you are interested in, rather than just vague, off-the-wall ad slams.  How do they do that?  It’s simple, but genius at the same time.  Facebook uses the information that we have all entered into our “Likes / Interests” area to send you ads that it thinks you might respond to.
As an example, for my …

What exactly is a lead capture gateway and how is that different from my website?
In this part, I’m going to explain how lead capture technology works. Just like in the example above, imagine that same real estate customer going to a search engine and clicking on a link to find properties. But unlike the previous example, this time the customer is diverted to our LCM Gateway technology.
Unlike a website, our LCM Gateway is designed to capture a maximum number of visitors, so instead of capturing …

So how do you capture a typical real estate customer? According to the National Association of REALTORS® 2009 Survey of Home Buyers and Sellers, 94% of all home buyers and sellers begin their quests on the Internet, and many of them begin by going to a search engine like Google or Yahoo, where they do a search for homes or listings.
Then they choose a link to a real estate website and visit that agent’s site hoping to find help in their search. The …

Houston, we have a problem.
In 2004 our company surveyed more than 481,000 REALTORS® with an average of 12.1 years in the business. You know what their number-one need was? To get more customers. Then in 2008 we surveyed nearly a million agents and asked them what their number one concern was, going forward. Again, overwhelmingly, it was finding enough business.
Even earlier this year (2010), I ran an unofficial poll on my blog. We have thousands of agent visitors every week. Guess …

The final article in Matt’s Max-Bang series last week (the one on cutting your overhead) really hit the nail on the head. We did exactly what that article says, and it saved our business. I told my story to Matt and he suggested that I share it with his readers in a guest post, so here goes.
Early last year, our real estate practice was on the verge of bankruptcy. My wife and I have been in real estate for ten years, but as with a lot of …

Allow me to pose a question. What does it take to become the top listing agent in your market? If you’ve ever asked yourself that question, you’re already on your way! You’ve shown that you’re interested in mastering the listing side of our business. And you’ve acknowledged that you are competitive — very competitive. You’ve shown your desire to become the best at something, so you’re not interested in mediocrity.
What if I told you that the difference between a struggling agent and …