I recently had a conversation with a well-respected agent regarding property photos. She mentioned that when she works with buyers, she photographs the properties (after asking permission from the listing agents) and creates showing “albums” on the photo sharing site Flickr for her buyers to reference. This practice makes her buyers happy in that they [...]

Kenneth Harney wrote a story in The Washington Post on Friday about a recent court challenge to a real estate broker’s "add-on" fee. Call them what you will:  "admin fee", "add-on fee", etc…….they’re basically junk fees.  There, I said it.  I used the "J" word. In the past 5-10 years, it had become a rather [...]

As I was scanning a few listings in our MLS looking for comparables recently, I noticed some pretty disturbing things: Public comments like “have a new home for Christmas” – obviously from 2008 No pictures.  Zilch.  Nada. No comments.  No public information.  No words to entice buyer-agents to show the listing. There’s just no excuse [...]

Randy Prothero, an agent in Mililani, Hawaii, recently wrote a post on Active Rain titled, “A Changing Market is no Excuse for Bad Behavior“.  To quote Randy, “When the market was hot, it seemed like people were crawling out of the woodwork to become real estate agents and loan officers.  They had little to no [...]

VAR recently brought a post on Realtor Magazine’s blog to my attention.  The article talks about how Charlotte, NC agents are having it “hard at the top”.  They are in one of the few US markets which has been unfazed by the national housing downturn. That is, Charlotte has actually shown an increase in property values [...]

The featured Active|Rain video blog today is an interview between Joel Burslem and Doug Heddings. Doug discussed his tremendous success using video tours for his listings. He uses a professional videographer who tapes and edits the videos at a cost of approximately $300-$500 each. What really caught my attention was Doug’s description of HOW to [...]