In a society where we refer to our homes as our castles, it makes sense that we also want to feel safe and secure in our residences. But as we spend more time inside looking at screens and less time outside making connections with neighbors, it also makes sense that many homeowners today feel less safe and secure than they did a few decades ago. The irony is that violent crime rates have decreased even as our feelings of danger lurking around every corner have increased. So what can you do to help assuage your fears — and actually make your community safer in the bargain? Plenty! Establishing ..read more

One of the most enticing aspects of choosing real estate as a career is the flexibility that it offers you. You can work as much or as little as you decide is right for you, and you can maintain those hours as long as they work for you. The hard part, of course, is realizing when you need to make a change in your career that better reflects your lifestyle. Although any agent can at any point decide that it’s time to move from full-time to part-time, not every agent takes advantage of their career’s ability to flex and flow with their needs. If your motivation is flagging and you’re having trou ..read more

Rent-to-own agreements have a bad reputation in the real estate industry, but is it deserved? Well, it depends. There are many different kinds of rent-to-own agreements, and each one can be modified and customized for the tenant and the landlord. Many rent-to-own agreements overwhelmingly favor the would-be seller of the property, the landlord, which is one reason why they have the reputation they do. What do you need to know about rent-to-own agreements — and could it be worth it for you?   The rent-to-own basics In a nutshell, the way rent-to-own works is that tenants agree to pay addit ..read more

Selling a house isn’t exactly like selling any other piece of property; there’s no reference book on how much a home should cost because home value depends on so many different factors that vary widely from residence to residence. For this reason, when many sellers are preparing to sell their house, they want to “test the market” — throwing a home price at the wall to see if it sticks, essentially. In practice, this usually means that sellers get a sense of how much their home might be worth by talking to some experts, then deliberately overprice their home when they list it on the market … ju ..read more

When seeking new and different lead-generation strategies, you’ve probably come across the recommendation to host a real estate seminar for potential clients. It’s a common way for real estate agents to get their names and brands out into the community, meet possible buyers and sellers, and explain how a qualified agent can smooth the real estate process. If you’ve ever tried to create a seminar, though, you know that to craft a good one, you need to invest quite a bit of time and possibly some money into the effort. Is creating a real estate seminar something you should consider in your real ..read more

You may know that more productive, successful real estate agents have assistants to help them manage the minutiae of the business — but how do you know if you’re there, yet? The question of when to hire an assistant can be a daunting one for many agents, and quite a few of them realize after they get an assistant that they probably could have hired one (and been appropriately relieved) much earlier than they did. Hiring an assistant doesn’t hinge on how long you’ve been in real estate, and you can absolutely justify hiring an assistant if you could use some help with the tasks that assistants ..read more

There are two schools of thought when it comes to real estate agents publicly supporting charities. One school holds that this is a solid business strategy — it can help differentiate agents in crowded markets especially, and many clients like to feel good about helping good people accomplish good things. The other school, however, holds that incorporating a charity and your support of that charity into your real estate business is too risky. The world is too divisive as it is, and choosing a particular charity that you’re going to advocate for and financially provision above others can drive ..read more

Some people are under the mistaken impression that you must have good (or even great) credit in order to buy a house. That’s truly not the case — there are plenty of opportunities for people with poor credit to start on the journey toward homeownership and end with a set of keys to their very own home in their hands. But it’s true that buying a house with bad credit can be a challenge that not everybody is equipped to face. If your credit isn’t exactly shiny and pristine, there’s still hope for your dream of owning your own house. Assess your situation, do what you can to improve it, and you’l ..read more

Buyers and sellers are becoming more and more educated about real estate transactions, but they also don’t know what they don’t know. As a result, agents have to answer more and more questions from buyers and sellers about their commission rates. This can be a sensitive topic because, after all, it’s about money, and agents have to get paid for their work just like anybody else. So what do you say to a client who wants you to take a lower commission?   Above all, remain calm Nobody likes to hear a client say that, essentially, you make too much money and you should be willing to take less ..read more

Starting any new marketing strategy as a real estate agent can be daunting, and although it’s one of the most successful ways to reach out to and stay in touch with clients, email marketing can appear to be one of the most challenging. It’s almost infinitely easier to just set up a Facebook business profile, invite all your friends to like it, and start posting left and right on it — even if you never get any viable sales that way. It’s unfortunate because email remains one of the most popular ways to communicate today (well above the telephone, and agents still cold-call leads). And if you ca ..read more