The last installment was more geared toward brokers and team leaders so I will make this one for agents.  I’ll warn you: This strategy will not make you friends, but it will make you money.  If you are like most agents today, you are struggling for sales opportunities.  You know what to do when you find a new customer, and hopefully, you do a great job.  The problem is finding enough customers.
Here’s a great way to find new customers, and it costs almost nothing.  It works best if you have …

Every year as part of the new edition of the Swanepoel TRENDS Report (www.RETrends.com) the 160 page Report also looks back at the passing year and lists those events that transpired during the year that made headlines and captured the industry’s attention and imagination. The 2010 edition is due for release on February 8, 2010. Here are the top events that during 2009 made headlines in the residential real estate brokerage industry.
(Photo: Copyright Shutterstock)

#10 Houston Becomes #1 REALTOR® Association
In August 2009 the Houston Association of Realtors® (HAR) …

(Worse Than Failure, of course!)  I know that most of you are accustomed to reading my weekly training posts, and I’m very glad to see them so well received.  Thank you for reading and for your many comments!  On Friday, I’ll still post my weekly training article, but today something happened that really ticked me off and I felt the need to rant!
So what happened that’s got me so steamed?  Today I got my invoice for my annual membership dues — you know, the National, State, and Local Associations of …

How to Know the Odds of Selling Any Home…
What if you could actually know the odds of selling a client’s home in 30 days… or 60 days… or 90 days?  Wouldn’t that make advising that client a lot easier?  Well now you can!  And it’s easy.
As a listing agent, one of the questions I was often asked by sellers when I was a listing their home was, “How long do you think it will take to sell my house?”  As a new agent I struggled with this, and I did …

HoopJumper WebSystems of Lake Forest, California has entered into a strategic alliance with real estate mapping pioneers RealBird, Inc. to offer a service that builds off Google’s massive real estate listing syndication database called GoogleBase. RealBird co-founder Zoltan Szendro has written a very interesting article about this groundbreaking new service which you can see at http://realbird.hoopjumper.com . His article is included in full below:
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Did Google just disrupt the real estate data status quo?
by Zoltan Szendro - CTO, EVP, Co-founder RealBird Inc.
Google just announced that they revamped the search capabilities on …

It’s the first week of February and the time my annual Swanepoel TRENDS Report is released. The 160-page annual publication announces the official list of Top 10 trends, strategies, innovations and changes shaping and changing the business of real estate.

For the last several years we have been summarizing the events of every year and forecasting the most likely shifts in the industry that could impact our industry. We have discussed topics such as the sub prime and housing meltdown (detailed back in December 2005 before the collapse), the growth in …

As part of the annual Swanepoel TRENDS Report that is published every year during the first week of February, the research team wraps their four month study of the real estate industry by announcing the top 10 Newsmakers, Events and Trendsetters for the year.
The first list to be released is the Newsmakers. Newsmakers are defined as those people that during the year made headlines as individuals, as a result of their actions and leadership of the companies or associations they are involved with in the real estate industry.
The Top 10 …

Every year the Swanepoel TRENDS Report identifies, analyzes and then details out the imminent changes that are expected to impact the real estate industry over the coming 12 – 18 months.The 2009 Report is currently in the final 60 days of research and writing and obviously with all the recent financial disasters, the energy crisis, the housing collapse and foreclosure catastrophe this has made 2008 the worst year in real estate and financial history.

Already thousands of hours of researching has been invested in drafting the 2009 Swanepoel TRENDS Report by …

There are many real estate website solution providers out there today.  And of course there’s also the option of going with a custom website.  This is an expensive options, but if you can afford it, I say do it - right.  Make sure you take the time to check references and google results for this person or company that says they can build you your dream site.  If all the sites in their portfolio are doing not so well on Google, why would you want them involved with your site?  You wouldn’t.  That said, if you cannot afford a custom site, which most agents cannot, I suggest you go with Advanced Access.  I have nothing to gain by recommending them…no affiliate code or anything.  And I know they have had their issues in the past as all growing solut

Not necessarily, they are very different sites. But the fact is, that in my reading over the weekend, I saw that Craigslist gets more hits than Realtor.com – are all those visitors there to buy real estate? No. But many are. Or they are looking for rentals, or they are potential sellers looking to see what agents are being pro-active in their marketing efforts for when they are ready to sell their home. The bottom line is that’s a lot of traffic and if you’re not taking advantage of it, I don’t see how you can be doing your best for your clients.