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.
,

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) …

Sitting in a car on a rainy day considering where to go to lunch? Easy answer! Just grab your GPS enabled phone and push a button. Up comes a list of nearby restaurants, which if you desire you can filter by type of food. Find one you like? Tap the screen and up comes not only the directions but all the details along with how others have rated it.

What’s next?

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, …

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 …

Here we are with summer in full swing and business is, well, let’s say interesting. As we refocus our efforts on the balance of the year, now is a great time to really stop and look at where we are, and what must be done to hit our goals for 2010.

Some of the biggest challenges we face today is the complicated nature of every transaction, with appraisals, lender restrictions, buyers that can’t decide and are waiting for further drops in prices, and the sheer amount of paperwork that is required to manage a deal. It seems we need more help to do fewer transactions than ever before. So what do we do?

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 …

One of the coolest and catchiest domains in real estate – cyberhomes.com – has just changed hands … again.

This successful national real estate website providing property data and valuations is in many regards one of the best real estate websites around. Yet somehow it has remained a step child in our industry, floating from one foster home to another. Let’s explore its unique journey and the reasons why, at the age of 15, this time it may be different.

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 …