The Joys of Homeownership

November 1, 2011 / abarker / No comments

Homeownership has many financial advantages, but it also has emotional and psychological advantages. Owning a home can create a better quality of life, especially for those with families. Here are some details from a great article found in the Cornerstone Newsletter:

Many home buyers are drawn to homeownership for these warm and fuzzy reasons.

Owning a home allows you to put down roots, both figuratively and literally. On one hand you become part of a neighborhood and community. When you rent, neighbors come and go as quickly as leases renew. Homeowners, however, tend to stay put longer.

What does this mean for you? You can develop, many times, lifelong relationships. This also means your home will see you through many of life’s important milestones.

It makes sense. Many people enter the realm of homeownership as young couples looking to build a nest. They plan on starting their own family and need room to expand and grow. These family homes will see many firsts and will be the container of countless memories. Additionally, homeownership gives families more room to entertain and this means extended family will also share in building memories.

It’s not just young families, though, that seek homeownership. Families with teenagers seek larger homes to room their growing brood. Retiring adults may wish to start a new phase and new memories, seeking out warmer climates or smaller, more manageable homes.

These little moments are what life is all about. Memories from Christmas mornings and summer vacations will fill minds for years to come.

On the other hand you literally can put down roots by planting trees and shrubs! Renters are rarely afforded the luxury of gardening. In fact, digging up the landlord’s yard is frowned upon. As a homeowner you are able to create your own green oasis, including trees that will mature alongside your children and gardens that will feed your hungry pack.

There is a certain pride that comes with homeownership. This little piece of property and land is yours. There’s no one that can evict you or take it away. This security allows people to form deep attachments to both the land and home.

via Cornerstone Real Estate ‘s Real Estate Update.

Short Sales | Top Metro Areas to Buy Short Sales

October 12, 2011 / abarker / No comments

Here is a great post from RealtyTrac, over the top US areas to buy Short Sales. Most of these areas have streamlined the process because short sales are pretty much the only thing you can buy in some of these markets.

Based on an analysis of RealtyTrac data, including average sales price, average discount, percent of all sales and the average days to sell a short sale, Foreclosure News Report compiled the following list of the Top 10 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) for buying a short sale..

1) LOS ANGELES

RealtyTrac data shows that properties sold via short sale in the second quarter took an average of 192 days to sell from the date they entered the foreclosure process, compared to an average of 186 days to sell an REO property from the time it was repossessed by the lender.

The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana metro area had more short sales than any other metro in the nation during the second quarter, registering 9,145 short sales in Q2 2011. Buyers saved 32 percent on their short sale transactions. The average price of a Los Angeles short sale was $350,237. View LA Short Sales Now

2) PHOENIX

With short sales accounting for nearly a quarter of all sales, Phoenix buyers had no shortage of pre-foreclosures bargains to choose from. In the second quarter of 2011, Phoenix buyers negotiated 8,434 short sale transactions, paying an average $133,793, with an average discount of 27 percent. Search for Phoenix Short Sales

3) CAPE CORAL-FORT MYERS, FL

During the housing boom, homebuilding was on steroids in Southwestern Florida, dredging hundreds of miles of swampy canals into a modern-day Venice on the Gulf of Mexico. At Lehigh Acres, a team of admen transformed a sprawling ranch east of Fort Myers into a new formula in mass-marketing real estate.

But that addiction to overbuilding and overpricing has left thousands of prospective sellers seriously underwater.

Cape Coral clocked in with 1,358 short sales in the second quarter of 2011, with an average price of $111,029. Buyers in Cape Coral paid 33 percent less for pre-foreclosure (short) sales than the average price for properties not in foreclosure. Search Cape Coral FL Short Sales Now

4) OXNARD-THOUSAND OAKS-VENTURA, CA

Two thousand miles away from Cape Coral, Fla., another coastal city in California has emerged as a short sale pioneer. Oxnard is among the metros most battered by the housing slump.

For short sale buyers, there are bargains galore in Ventura County. The Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA metro had 681 short sales in the second quarter of 2011. Prices were slashed 24 percent on short sales, with the average price at $352,994 according to RealtyTrac. Short sales accounted for 26 percent of all real estate transactions.

5) RENO-SPARKS, NV

About 60 percent of homeowners in Reno owe more on their house than the house is worth, making the short sale market in Reno is huge.

Pre-foreclosure sales alone accounted for nearly 30 percent of all sales in the second quarter of 2011, according to RealtyTrac. Buyers paid only $156,664 on average for a Reno short sale (less than it costs to build a new house), and the 702 short sales in Reno during the second quarter represented a 50 percent increase from the previous quarter.

Find Short Sales in Washoe County

6) SAN FRANCISCO

Short sales in the San Francisco metro rose 47 percent from the first quarter to the second quarter to a total of 3,237. Buyers snagged an average discount of 41 percent on pre-foreclosures, although the average price for a short sale was still a lofty $364,766. Search for San Francisco Short Sales

7) SAN JOSE

Once considered a safe alternative to the overheated Bay Area real estate market, the San Jose metro — home to the Silicon Valley — has no shortage of short sale inventory.

The East Bay area of Northern California offers homebuyers and investors big discounts on short sales, averaging a whopping 41 percent savings. Despite the big discount, the average short sale price of $420,806 in the San Jose area was still one of the highest in the country.

8) PORTLAND MSA

Portland, a metropolitan area of some 2.2 million people, is a spring board to the drizzly Pacific Northwest. The area reported a total of 756 pre-foreclosure (short) sales in the second quarter, up 39 percent from the previous quarter and accounting for 11 percent of all sales.

9) ATLANTA

Atlanta was another metro at the top of the short sale list for the second quarter, with a 21 percent bump in pre-foreclosure sales from the prior quarter. In the metro Atlanta area, 2,595 short sales were sold to third party buyers in in the second quarter, accounting for 14 percent of all sales.

View Atlanta Short Sales

10) MILWAUKEE

Rounding out the Top 10 was the Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis metro, where 324 short sales took place between April and the end of June 2011 — up 20 percent from the previous quarter. The average price for a short sale was $107,980, 41 percent below the average price of a property not in foreclosure.

Read more from originial article Top 10 Short Sale Markets

via Short Sales | Top Metro Areas to Buy Short Sales.

How Many Leads Will Realtors Get With Boomerang Leads?

September 30, 2011 / abarker / No comments

Most of our potential new leads want to know, “how many leads am I going to get?”

We get it. We wish that we could tell you exactly how many leads we will be able to provide. Unfortunately, we can never really know how many real estate leads we’ll be able to generate for a specific area. We can make educated guesses based on past experience, but sometimes we are completely wrong. There are many factors that will determine how many leads you will get.

Some of these factors include:

  • How established our website was when our client started. Some of our websites already get LOTS of traffic. Others don’t get traffic yet, but will start getting it once we focus our efforts on the site.
  • How long it takes Google to respond to our increased efforts in improving the websites once we get a client. Google, Yahoo, and Bing have a mind of their own. Sometimes they immediately recognize our websites as “authority” sites, while other times it takes months before they will grant them the “#1 organic ranking”.
  • How competitive the SEO and real estate markets are in a given area. Some areas have lots of competition from other real estate agents and brokerages competing for the organic SEO spots. Other areas have only competition from the national syndication sites.
  • Consumer behavior, trust, and willingness to fill in an online form. We have found that different regions of the Country are more trusting than others. In some areas the percentage of visitors who fill out our online forms is much higher than other areas.
  • Quantity of overall online searches. The time of year, holidays, consumer confidence, and other external factors influence the quantity of online home search activity. For example, less people search for homes online in September compared with the spring or summer months.

Visit the Boomerang Blog to see actual stats on how many leads our actual clients are getting each month.

via Broker Agent Social Network – Alan Barker’s blog – How Many Leads Will You Get With Boomerang Leads?.

Google vs Yahoo & Bing

July 27, 2011 / Kirk / No comments

Often times getting a website to rank #1 is the only thing that matters.  But infact, it’s not actually the only thing that matters – 20% of what matters is also Yahoo & Bing (which use the same engine to gather results now.  The proof is that when you try something in Yahoo, the bottom of the page says – you guessed it – Powered by Bing).  More detail is visible at the website link at the bottom.

But here is one quick example of how Yahoo and Bing can be more powerful than Yahoo.  At the very beginning of creating a website, Google doesn’t favor it quite how Bing does.  Google wants a site to prove itself, but Bing seems to instantly recognize any you work you do on it.  For example, Cape Coral Florida has a new website which was nearly blank, but several leads started going into it.  After a short time when you enter Cape Coral Florida as a search term was listing CapeCoralFlHomes.com as #4 in Bing!  And it was being lead to the internal Short Sales page where all the other links were directing.  Don’t underestimate the power of links.

Kirk’s Internet Marketing.

Generation Y: Sales & Marketing: REALTOR Magazine

May 24, 2011 / abarker / No comments

When working real estate leads its important to understand the behavior of different demographics and generation, younger people want to communicate differently than people of older generations. If you can’t catch them on the phone, it might not be you, it’s them. Here is some great information on the youngest demographic of buyers according to Realtor.org

This generation, also referred to as Millennials, now numbers around 80 million U.S. residents. And many of them are just a few years away purchasing their first home. How can you position yourself as the real estate professional they want to work with?

They Want It All — Now

Austin, Texas-based Laura Duggan — an early adopter of texting — learned the value of communication while selling Jason Dorsey, 32, and his wife a home two years ago. Phone messages Duggan initially left for Dorsey were not immediately returned, losing valuable time in a market where hot deals on smaller-size homes are scooped up within days. Dashing off a text message, however, yielded a lightning-quick reply from Dorsey.

“They want to communicate differently than a lot of my other clients. Gen Y wants texts, not even e-mail,” says Duggan, broker-owner of West Austin Properties, who has 30 years of experience selling homes.

“Gen Y is about instant gratification: If we can’t see it on our phone, it doesn’t really exist,” explains Dorsey, who is a frequent keynote speaker on Generation Y. He’s consulted for companies like Kraft, GE, Frito-Lay, and McDonald’s. While Dorsey and his peers can easily navigate the Internet in search of data, they often don’t know how to make sense of it. Still, “it’s critical that REALTORS® position themselves to educate us and not treat us like children,” says Dorsey. “If we don’t feel like we can ask questions and be a part of the process, we’re not going to be interested.”

The Right Information

Real estate pros can help put information about a listing into context, such as how property taxes differ from a nearby city or interpreting neighborhood crime statistics, he says.

“This is a generation that takes advantage of information. They come in [to a home showing] knowing everything about the property,” says Nashville-based consultant Amy Lynch, who works with companies that want to motivate Generation Y.

via Generation Y: Sales & Marketing: REALTOR Magazine.

Home Buyers Today

May 24, 2011 / abarker / No comments

With modern society, social media, text messaging, instant communication, and the modern world, real estate buyers today are different than they were in the past.

New buyers today have a lot of fear about economic conditions and the housing market. They have seen and heard horror stories from people who have gone through foreclosure and who have watched net worth turn upside down and credit destroyed.

Some principles are universal, they will and have always stayed the same while other practices in working with real estate buyers need to adapt.

Realtors still need to engage their buyers. They still need to show them they care, and are working for them. This is a universal principle, it will always exist, it’s part of human nature.

According to the great real estate trainer Brian Buffini, Buying a home is a logical decision, but it is also an emotional decision. Good real estate agents need to help with the emotional appeal. Many buyers go about starting the home buying process the wrong way. They start out looking at homes that they have no business looking at. When these homes are too expensive, they are only disappointed with what they actually can afford.

One way to help avoid this huge disappointement is to get buyers to get prequalified for a mortgage loan before they ever start home shopping. This also saves Realtors lots of time when working with buyers. 14% of California Buyers get all the way to the closing table before the lender tells them that they can’t actually qualify for their home loan.

Home buyers have more knowledge than they did in the past, they have almost always looked at homes online before they ever talk to a Realtor. This doesn’t mean that they don’t need to be educated. Buyers still need to know the home buying process. They need to know how real estate agents work, otherwise their chances to stay loyal to you aren’t good. They need to know how the offer and negotiation work, they need to know what to do when handling objections.

Even people who have bought homes before still need to be educated. They may not really understand.

An important thing to help home buyers understand and get educated is to share with them the facts.

The average first time buyer lives in a home for just 4 years. The decision on buying a “starter home” shouldn’t be nearly as overwhelming as most people make it.

Mortgage interest rates right now are how low? We’re talking all time lows. For a 30 year period of time the average interest rate was 8.9%. From an affordability standpoint, for most buyers, the mortgage interest rate is a bigger factor than the price of the home. To most buyers, it is the monthly payment that matters more than the home’s price tag.

Buying a home is a process of elimination. It is narrowing down a huge list of potential and available homes to the very best home. Real estate agents want to get feedback from their buyers, to really understand what they like, and what will make a good fit for them and their needs. Brian Buffin thinks that getting property feedback is the best way to really connect with his buyers. The best connection, is that connection over properties.

While buyer behavior is different today, while real estate lead generation is different, some principles never change. Good real estate agents will understand these principles, and make their time productive and profitiable.

 

 

 

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April 25, 2011 / abarker / No comments

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