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Catch Up

January 12, 2012
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One of the worst things you can do if you want to make an impact with a blog is to take a long break from posting anything.  I have two excuses that aren’t really legitimate. If  you put a lot of effort into something you don’t want your progress slip back and make success even [...]

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Another Barbara Corcoran Video

February 22, 2011
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Use her authority The video below of Matt Lauer interviewing Barbara Corcoran lends some authority to much of the content found on this site.  As agents we can use that authority to convince listing clients to get their homes ready for market. Adapt for your market Barbara Corcoran’s primary market is New York city. Hardly [...]

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Are you a Linchpin or a Cog?

July 6, 2010
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Real estate marketing lessons from strange places. I hadn’t talked to Homer in a while. Homer is a fellow real estate agent weathering the storm of a lousy housing market in a part time job at our favorite “big box” hardware store. When I ran into Homer he was in the “Tool Corral” where all [...]

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When the going gets tough…

June 23, 2010
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The tough get going. There’s lots of hand wringing in our industry these days. This morning there were dueling headlines.  One indicated that new home sales had increased over 19% in May. The other said that there was a record drop in May of over 30%. There are several reasons for the apparent contradiction. First [...]

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Manspace

April 19, 2010

I found this short video while entertaining myself on Ted.com. What do you do when you’re asked to stage a home with a full sized boxing ring in the garage? Or a faux bowling alley in the back yard? I found this concept fascinating. Probably because I’m sitting in a room that was once a [...]

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Introducing Homer

April 19, 2010
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Big Box Lessons Lessons for Marketing Homes Note: Homer is a pseudonym for an underemployed agent friend of mine who has been working a one of the big box home improvement stores since the market took a dive.  I ran into him on the plumbing aisle on a slow day and he agreed to an [...]

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Where Are the Newspapers?

April 17, 2010
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Real estate and newspapers are two industries that could help each other out. The conventional wisdom is that newspaper advertising is a waste of money for real estate agents.  What those outside of real estate may not realize is that it never did much for marketing homes in the first place.  As the Hobbs-Herder folks [...]

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Luxury Marketing on the Left Coast

March 30, 2010
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Be impressed. A lot of trends start on the west coast and eventually find there way to the good Old North State where I live, but you have to wonder about this one. Why? We’ll discuss that in a moment but first take a couple of minutes to view this video in full screen and [...]

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Pricing a Listing

February 1, 2010
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Surfing through the waters of real estate marketing advice you encounter a lot of hype. Some of the stuff is downright comical.  As I’ve argued many times on this and my other sites, most of it is about agents marketing themselves and not about marketing their listings. Last week I came across this video that [...]

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A Dirty Little Secret…

August 18, 2009
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Suhh…don’t tell anybody else…but most agents have never learned to market homes. “What!” you say, “But that’s what they get paid for!” When I talk about things like this, especially to people in the industry, I get these blank stares that say “What the hell is he talking about…we’ve been selling homes for decades.” And [...]

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