Suze Orman said to do what????

A few weeks ago I went to the shore for a few days to relax. While I was there, I did something I rarely do anymore - I read the Sunday newspaper cover to cover. It was enjoyable for the most part, but then I came across this bizarre column from Suze Orman that I saved just so I could share it with you.

Here it is in digital form, courtesy of PostBulletin.com (which is not where I read it before).

I hope you'll take the minute or two to read it, but in case you don't allow me to present the short-n-sweet recap. Basically, Suze suggests that real estate buyers should go through a series of inspections before submitting an offer. Good advice, I suppose, until you get into the crux of her suggestions...

For example (and these are direct quotes from the column):
- "Pull back the rugs -- you never can tell what those fine threads are hiding."
- "No matter what season it is, check that the summer screens and the winter storm windows are in good shape. If you're buying in the summer, turn off the air-conditioning and crank up the radiators. In the winter, do the reverse. "
And here's a good one:
- "If you're buying an apartment, ask residents next door, above, and below to turn on their stereos and television sets and just walk around." (can you imagine how that would go over by the time the third real prospect who came around?)

And then, there is my ALL TIME FAVORITE...
- "If your purchase includes the washing machine, dryer and dishwasher, run a load in each of them. (Bring a few dirty dishes and towels of your own if need be.)"

Did she just say to do laundry in the house? To bring your dirties over and throw them in the Maytag just to make sure the spin cycle is extra quiet?

I am a fan of Suze's work and I am certainly in favor of buyers not getting a surprise right after closing, but I am hard pressed to tell a seller, even in this market, that they have to leave a box of Tide out before each showing just in case the buyer has a load of whites they didn't get done before work. Call me old school....

Nevertheless, I wanted you to see this on the off chance your buyers love Suze too.

So you want to blog now, eh?

In the last few days I have had a number of people tell me they are keeping up with the posts on The Hearthside Herald. Ironic that everyone came out of the woodwork when I started talking about postcards :-(

Anyway, I figured that all this interest in my blog may have a few people thinking about doing it themselves. So I thought it was time to link you back to a good "how to" post.

Check out this article from the Juicy Tomato if you want to get started blogging. If you need help setting up a blog please feel free to drop me a line!

By the way - special thanks to our new Education Director Stefanie Hahn for pointing me to the Juicy Tomato....be sure to check out her training blog too!

Postcard Marketing Insight

You all know how I feel about postcard marketing (hate it) but since many of you still like to do it I thought you would find this post from Alison Rogers of Inman News interesting. She makes very valid points about consumer behavior and reaction rates.

http://www.inman.com/buyers-sellers/columnists/alisonrogers/dos-and-donts-postcard-marketing

I just saw this great blog post from Joseph Ferrara on the Sellsius Real Estate Blog

Send your business card by phone by using Dropcard (click to read)

It highlights a new service called Dropcard, which allows you to sign up for a (free) profile with your contact info, and then use your cell phone to text message the service whenever you want your contact info sent to someone by email. How cool!

Not only is it great for people like me who never seem to have a card on them, BUT it is also a great way to capture email addresses from those new people you meet....

Ah the possibilities - Thanks for the heads up Sellsius!

Sign, Sign - Everywhere a Sign...

Depending on how old you are different singers are running through your head, but nevertheless we all know the general idea.

As I was driving around our market area over the last few days I paid particular attention to signs - and a few things I want you to remember when doing your business.

Before I pick on anyone, however, I want to remind you how important signs are to our business. Our internal market statistics show signs as one of the top 3 factors driving sales, and the NAR reports that 29% of people surveyed are living in their current house because they saw a sign.

Alright, back to my tour of the market. Friday I was driving to an event in western Montgomery County. As I was driving, I kept looking at the Coldwell Banker signs, trying to learn who the players are in our new territory (and seeing how many of them were ours). Imagine my surprise when I saw a Coldwell Banker Landis Homesale Services sign! That company has been out of business since the beginning of the year! Obviously it makes it hard for us to explain the transition from CB Diamond to CB Hearthside when we haven't even told the market that CB Diamond took over Homesale Services...

So, that was my first view. Later that same weekend (at about 7:00 at night) I was driving to the store when I passed one of our central Bucks offices. As I always do, I looked into the parking lot to see who was there. Nobody was there, and since it was late evening I didn't think anything of it....until I saw the "office open" sign sitting two feet from the highway. Ugh. We work so hard to get clients to walk in to our office, and here we don't have the decency to tell them when we aren't there. Hopefully nobody showed up looking for our top-tier real estate services before the office opened up the next morning.

Of course none of these will ever compare with the sign I saw with the rider made out of construction paper and marker - heaven knows this set our company in just the right light.

Just keep in mind the image your signs provide to the marketplace, and what you can do about it. If you see something, point it out to your colleague, your manager, the marketing folks. you wouldn't let your fellow agents go to a networking event wearing a Coldwell Banker shirt and no pants would you? Take that mental picture with you the next time you think about your signs.

C21 launches a new national site - have you looked?

"If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in peril." - Sun Tzu

Century 21 announced this week that they were launching their new national brand site, www.Century21.com. While I have my own opinion of it, I encorage you to check it out and see what you think.

Whether you like it or hate it, you should know all about it. Keep in mind that as a result of the new listing-sharing program initiated by Realogy, your listings will be on this site sometime soon (it doesn't seem as if they are on the site right now).

Look at it and comment with your thougths - we'll discuss more in later posts.

Coldwell Banker to start sharing listings today

OK, so we all know that Coldwell Banker is the most frequently-visited national real estate brand site on the web, right? The chart to the left is based on Nielsen NetRatings for the first five months of this year and shows that ColdwellBanker.com beats ReMax.com by more than 25%

Well, now the folks at Coldwell Banker have gone one step further to make the national brand site better. Starting today, listings from all the Realogy brands (Century 21, ERA, Sotheby's International Realty) will be on the site side-by-side with those from Coldwell Banker.

What does this mean for you? Well, first of all it means our national web site will become even more popular than it was, because there will be more properties available for people to see. While it is not yet a national IDX (but the company is headed that way, trust me) it provides one of the largest collections of properties for sale under one brand (remember that ReMax does it by combining 1000s of comany sites under one loose umberella).

The other thing it means for you is more leads. Today people at all the other brands are announcing that Coldwell Banker listings will be on thier sites, too. Great news for you, because it means four more sites our listings are syndicated to [glossary term - syndicated means to automatically feed listing data to another web site] each day.

Realogy has developed a unique method for passing the leads around. On your home site (so for us that means on Coldwell Banker.com) all the leads for listings of the branded company (meaning all the Coldwell Banker leads) continue to go to the branded company's agents. Beyond that, leads for other brands' listings go to that brand a percentage of the time and to the other brands a percentage of the time. The percentages are determined by the percent of listings each brand has in the zip code. For example, let's use zip code 18901 - which is Doylestown, PA. Hypothetically (I didn't check for certain) Coldwell Banker Hearthside has 50 listings, Sothebys has 25, Century 21 has 25 and ERA has 0. Grand total = 100. If a consumer goes to ColdwellBanker.com and asks a question about one of the 50 CBH listings, each time the lead goes to CBH - no questions asked. If they go to the site, however, and choose a Sotheby's listing then one time that lead will go to Sotheby's, one time it will go to Century 21 and two times it will go to CBH (25%, 25%, 50%...get it?). Should be interesting to see in practice.

Of course the same holds true - which means a CBH agent in that same 18901 zip could get a lead from SothebysRealty.com or Century21.com based on the same percentage.

What does it all mean - it means (once again) that being part of a branded company pays dividends, and that as the internet grows, being the bigger fish in the pond is very important to getting the food.

Enjoy your 4th of July!