loudog's Blog: All Categories

Penetrating Affluent Markets

For those listing agents that deal with the affluent market segments in their area one thing consistently rings true no matter what area of the country you work in . . . high-end listings usually come through word of mouth.  With every high end listing we get, we as real estate agents do almost as much to impress the client as we do to market the listing.  This ensure that we are talked about among the circles of the elite.  During the staging process, it is common to setup a decorative kiosk of relevant listing information and advertising materials.  One effective additive to your display is an album of photographs showing the detail of property in every perspective i.e summer, winter, fall, early morning, late evening,…

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Technorati Profile

This is my post to verify my Technorati Profile.  If any of you come across it and have some experience or advice with this please comment.

 

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Great Beginings

The first thing you think of when you hear or read the word Woodstock is the Woodstock Festival of 69 right?  Despite the name connection, the actual concert was held 43 miles away from Woodstock New York in our neighboring Sullivan County in the town of Bethel.  This being said, there is no shortage of culture in Woodstock.  The 1903 Byrdcliffe art colony is the oldest Arts & Crafts colony in America. The movement brought artists to Woodstock to teach the art of furniture, ceramics, metal works, weaving and went on to start Woodstock's first painting school.  Woodstock will be forever changed thanks to the cultural contributions of the Byrdcliffe Colony.

Woodstock New York Today

Today Woodstock is still one of the most popular…

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When training new agents, one of the things they have the most difficulty with is, planning the route of the homes they are showing.  Our market exists within a rural area with a senseless system of dirt roads, back roads, secondary roads, highways and roads that look like driveways.  Making your way around can some times be difficult, let alone keeping a schedule.

The problem . . .

The way it works here is that a buyer agent would have to call the listing office of each listing he or she plans to show, make an appointment for each and hope to arrive at each listing around the time the appointment was made (or the seller usually gets upset).  To do this correctly the buyer's agent would first have to geographically select the properties in a logical…

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A great little tip I picked up at the last Prudential manager's conference.  It has everything to do with combating some the bad press that seems to be relentlessly distributed in regards to the state of the market.

As stated in some of my past blogs, our local Ulster County Real Estate market enjoys a significant boost to our second home market.  This boost comes about because of the unique combination of our proximity to New York City and the value of the home buying dollar in our area as compared to other "get away" destinations within 2 hours of Manhattan.  The result of this boost  levels off our market when other markets maybe suffering from a downfall.

What I found out yesterday, it that there are many markets throughout the east coast that fair…

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I think signatures are a great tool for real estate agents. I train my agents to use them as a method of response to an otherwise daunting task of replying to large volumes of website leads (thanks to REW).

Our email system (Outlook on an in-house Exchange server) has the capability of creating several signatures per email account. With this feature we have our agents create several signatures with canned response content based on the most common requests for information we recieve via the website. That way if a website request on land comes in, the agent has a canned response for land he or she can use to reply to it. The same could be done with condos, single family, etc. What makes this great is that you can take your time and come up with a very… Read Full Post

Nobody really knows exactly where the Hudson Valley Area starts and stops. As the term becomes more marketable it seems that it takes on a life of its’ own and grows in every direction along the Hudson River. From a real estate perspective, second-home buyers looking for the most bang for their buck are looking on the west side of the river heading more north into the Catskills, in search of more home buying value. Ulster and Sullivan Counties seem to be the destination of choice. Delaware County to the northwest, and Greene County, are second choices when selecting a second home.

  The east side of the river has a second-home market located mostly in Dutchess County. This area is popular with commuters working in the lower quarter of New York State… Read Full Post

Here in Upstate New York we enjoy a niche market consisting of New York City residents looking to escape city life and enjoy a little of what country living has to offer.  Along with the extra acreage, privacy, views and water features comes one other requirement of our city buyers, a feature I refer to as the naked factor.

The naked factor refers to either the entire property or a portion of the property being secluded enough to be comfortably naked outside.  I don't understand it completely but have learned to adapt my sales style to it as it represents a high-end portion of our market.  After all, it has to be relatively easy to identify this requirement in a property, right?  My first stab at demonstrating my ability to find naked properties came as I…

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