Real estate training

What Eminem Can Teach Us About Marketing a Home

March 27, 2011

If ever a city had a loser image it is Detroit. I’m usually a part of the large audience that watches the Superbowl every year for the football or the ads or both. For me it’s usually more about the football. But even a little groggy from too much food and a few beers, one [...]

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Location, location, location

December 26, 2010

What Trulia wants from Movity I came across a news item that Trulia is buying Movity. Since I had never heard of Movity, I looked for its website. All I found on the homepage was an invitation to request an invitation to be a beta tester. On the About page this is what I found: [...]

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When the going gets tough…

June 23, 2010

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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Treat Your Listing Like a BMW

June 22, 2010

Home marketers can learn from auto dealers. In our post about the real estate distribution system as flea market we had some fun describing how many ways they were similar. We could have just as easily compared the real estate market to a used car lot. Think about the experience of buying a used car. [...]

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Our Distribution System

June 16, 2010

The Real Estate Flea Market Flea markets are fun. If you read a few profiles on any of the dating sites and you’ll surely see flea markets as a “favorite thing to do” at least once. This conjures up languid Sunday mornings strolling through the makeshift booths holding hands, people watching and looking for bargains. [...]

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Introducing Homer

April 19, 2010

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

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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Real Estate Copy Writing

February 22, 2010

How would you write a movie review? There are other posts here about copy writing in real estate but there are a lot of points that bear repeating and expansion. Recently I wrote a post for another blog that focuses on luxury real estate. The basic theme was that what you are trying to do [...]

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Football Season is Over

December 7, 2009

College athletics will never be reformed because the would be reformers have it all wrong. I graduated from Notre Dame in the sixties with a degree in English Lit and some swag to remind me that I was a small part of a National Championship football team. I now live in Durham North Carolina and [...]

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Is it really dead for real estate in the winter?

November 26, 2009

Thanksgiving is often seen in the industry as the end of the fall season for selling homes and the beginning of the “dead season” during the winter months. It’s not true. I’ve often wondered whether this myth was purposely advanced by successful agents so that they could either 1) Take a little break themselves for [...]

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