judyo's Blog: General Real Estate

My real estate partner meets a lot of people due to her bartending job in Orland Park, IL.  She met a guy a while back that was having a beer because his wife was shopping in the nearby Orland Park mall.  My partner, a friend I met in 6th grade, has a way with words and has no shame to admit she is a REALTOR and a bartender. 

She owned a couple of her own bars but sold her last one a couple years ago and went back into real estate.  Another REALTOR friend is part-owner of a popular restaurant/lounge and offered her a postion, which she gladly accepted.  She brings in the clients and I do most of the rest of the work.  She isn't computer literate but likes to sit open houses so we work well together.

So this guy actually calls us as his listing was about…

I have passed up more listings in the past year than I have the entire 26 years I've been in the business, and it's leaving me questioning if maybe I should take a break with my current listing system.  I just returned home from a listing presentation for an Oak Forest condominium for sale that was an expired listing but these sellers cannot afford to sell right now.

I get listing appointments from people finding my websites, referrals and past clients.  I also send out a postcard program to expireds and fsbos, although there aren't many fsbo's left in my area.  My websites are already up so unless I want to pay someone to help me create a landing page or something special for sellers, I can let my sites do the work they're already performing.

I'm…

It's not quite finished yet as I need to add some more search features and more data in the Detailed Report, but I'm just giddy about my new REW custom IDX.  It's too soon to start appearing on the search engines for specific listings and I'm wondering how long it takes to get some of those new pages spidered and indexed.  I believe my page count has about doubled but I don't remember exactly how many were shown as being indexed before.

Fun With Snippets

I thought I needed to call Morgan to get a step-by-step guide to using snippets but one day when I had nothing going on I sat down and tried them out and found success.  I love being able to show all of the Orland Park homes for sale starting right on the Orland Park page.

I'm still working the snippets…

A couple weeks ago I was spending hours excitedly going through Scottsdale, AZ listings sent to me by my agent with a fine tooth comb.  My husband and I would love to be snowbirds in AZ and figured if we wait until we're ready to retire Scottsdale prices will be unattainable for us at that time.  I do have hope for the future of real estate!

We figure if we don't buy something now to get our foot in the door of AZ property ownership with current affordable prices and interest rates, we'll regret it.  We will be visiting AZ at the end of the month (it coincides well with a New Year's Eve gig my husband has with a musician friend that lives in Gilbert) and will be viewing properties then.  We will be pre-approved buyers.

And then I read this post

I'm an…

I don't care how good a real estate agent one is, we all run into sellers that just won't listen to us about price.  I can sit there with factual information, thinking I'm getting through, only to be told that they want to list at $25,000 or more than my Comparative Market Analysis gave as market value.  And when that happens, I walk away.

I'm starting to collect good articles and posts I've found regarding price.  I had many in my Firefox Favorites but lost them when I cleaned up my computers.  Some I still had saved were no longer on good urls.

So I'm starting again and will list a couple good articles I found:

• Marc Rasmussen wrote a good one on REW that sounds like a recent NAR article I read called "10 Tips to Pricing Your Home in a Down…

I'm certainly not as busy as I'd like to be but there was a big lull in my area for awhile.  All of a sudden, a few of my listings were getting a nice amount of showings and one of my Tinley Park homes for sale just got a contract.  That was a nice one since the sellers already purchased a new townhouse and are living apart - one in the townhouse and one in the house (many people don't realize that their Home Owner's insurance probably doesn't cover a vacant property).  This couple isn't taking the chance.

Another thing I noticed is the amount of my VOW sign-ups (VOW requires registration) has gone up recently. In fact, I had an e-mail conversation with an Active Rainer about a new lead generating program he started using called Growth Leader.  He told me…

I'm walking away from more listings lately than ever.  More this year than in all the 25 years I've been in the biz.  And I'll keep doing it when sellers won't face the facts.

I was on a listing appointment for Blue Island real estate last week.  It was a legal 2-flat that looked like a single family residence with a 3 bedroom unit on the main level and a 1 bedroom unit upstairs.  The sellers lived in another home and needed to get one of their properties sold.  They said whichever one sells first means they'll keep and live in the other one.

I explained today's Buyer's Market to them and showed them all of the comparable listings.  However, this was a unique set-up so I got as close to their unit as possible.  They seemed to understand, even though…

Wow!  Talk about the power of the Internet.  You haven't been reading too many blogs or fourms lately if you haven't heard about Marc Rasmussen vs. SAR MLS (Sarasota Multiple Lisitng Service).  To quickly summarize, SAR MLS wants Marc to hand over his long-held domain name, thesarasotamls.com.  You can read the original post that started fellow REALTORS to unite here: Sarasota Multiple Listing Service (SAR MLS).

And let's not forget Marc's new domain name for Sarasota homes for sale.  Marc took down his original domain which caused this brouhaha and simply wants to be able to redirect it to his new domain.  After all, he is the owner of the domain in question.

This has made other real estate agents very mad!

And they've been writing about it.  There…