The home I co-listed with Vicki Agregado on 4032 Birchgrove Way in Rosemont closed escrow last week while I was on vacation.

Hooray!

This listing took longer than we expected to sell, and we faced extensive competition from foreclosures, short sales, and other distressed properties selling in the neighborhood.

This is true in spite of the fact that along the way the list price of this home was what we considered reasonable — toward the end the winning combination was a deeply discounted list price and an above market commission.

I’m hoping to have good news about a Realtor® I’ve been recruiting for some time now.  Last I heard she’s leaning toward Elite from her current position at (Mumbledee-Mumbledee), so I hope it comes together.  The story behind this agent is rather interesting, inasmuch as I began talking to her last year while I was doing some general recruiting, because her production numbers looked quite good.  What I found out later from an email from her is that she’d started blogging in the meantime but felt a little intimidated because I had done everything she’d thought of doing.

I wasn’t in fishing for compliments mode at that point, but had I been, that would have been a nice catch.   I took her comments instead as an opportunity to make some progress on an idea I’d had stewing for some time, about beginning to grow the company not only as a team of outstanding agents, but also as a community of outstanding players in the Internet market space.

I’m a firm believer in doing what you know, over and over again, better and better.  That may be because I’m in my late forties and I’m starting to act like the proverbial old dog who can’t learn a new trick.  Then again, maybe it’s because it works.

I’m really hopeful that this will come together.  I have a lot of projects that I need tons of writing help on, and would like to really start putting together some great new information that will benefit all Sacramento area buyers and sellers but also help more of my agents have more opportunities to work with the same great Internet-savvy people we’ve had the joy of working with in the past.  Quite frankly, I need someone with a little bit of technical focus to help me think strategically about the whole business, too, because lately I’ve been stretched a bit thin and I’m becoming a bit of a Zombie typing machine.

Recently I had the pleasure to chat with a fellow parent of a student where my daughter goes to school about her intention to get a real estate license. I always find it fun to talk to people who are new in the business, as it reminds me of that time in my own career, and it gives me a chance to clarify for myself what I think is important about this business. She asked me about the hours, as many people do, because they’re so likely to see us working on weekends. And yes, there’s a lot of that. If you want to make any money in this business, you pretty much have a choice between working a lot of weekends and/or managing others who do. On the flip side of that, no other job is as lenient about you taking a nap at 2:30 on a Wednesday afternoon if there are no clients to meet at that time and you feel you need one.

We discussed the car issue. She needs to get a better car soon and wanted to know how important it was to have the fancy wheels that Realtors® are infamous for. I don’t have fancy wheels — I have a Honda Accord. So I told her that I’ve sold quite a few houses in a Honda Accord. That seemed to help.

We discussed what the most important traits of a Realtor® are. I said the one I care most about as a broker is honesty. Then I moved on to include optimism — whether innate or learned. Also patience. As a software developer, I had pretty complete control over outcomes — through careful work, testing, and the like. As a Realtor®, I have very little or no control over outcomes. Much of this job (all of it?) involves being able to extend oneself for another human being with no certainty of success. This is not always easy — and it certainly wasn’t natural for me early on. I had to learn it.

Then we got into some of the more everyday skills like knowing about the local market, qualifying buyers, objection handling, and the like.

None of the newcomers I’ve ever talked to has invented the time / space warp device that incorporates my biggest suggestion of all: if you can find a way to skip over your first year, do that. The first year has too much failure and uncertainty in it for my taste. Not for everyone, perhaps, but certainly for a lot of people.

One final thing occurred to me several days later — just today in fact, after a past client informed me that another agent had just bought his listing. You need to know enough basic Google skills to be able to locate the Queen Video when you need it.

Next!

We haven’t announced a winner (in the gets a Starbucks Gift Card sense) of our fabulous pick that sign contest, but I’m seeing the beginnings of a strong majority opinion favoring sign one.

I hate to give up the lovely crown that my wife helped me draw, so taking one of the suggestions about moving off the “Realtor(r)” logo and balancing it out with the crown I can’t bear to lose and throwing in some borders gives us:

Did I lose the simplicity you liked by throwing that in? If not, this may be considered yard sign 0.9 (beta release).

Our agents have been busy over the last few weeks taking lots of new listings, and as a result, we really need to be ordering more signs soon. Since we never really decided on a design format for our real estate signs, I propose we have a contest over the next twenty-four hours or thereabouts. I’ll randomly select someone for a Starbucks gift card from everyone who votes on one of the signs below. (To vote, scroll down to the bottom of this post and leave a comment). To see a larger picture of any of these, click on the sign. [Signs 4 and 5 were last minute entries].

Ok, I’m not a graphic artist or anything, so this might be a “least of three evils” sort of deal, but play anyway!

Tell your friends. This is the biggest media event since Brittany Spears went into rehab.

Sign 1:
 

Sign 2:
 

Sign 3:
 

Sign 4:
 

Sign 4:
 

Thanks!

You look great in front of your new home in El Dorado Hills. It was a real treat getting to work with you! Thanks as well for holding up those marvelously self-interested riders and for giving me permission to show everyone how nice you look.

I’ve been quite busy digging into our new real estate transaction system, SettlementRoom. One of Murphy’s laws of unintended consequences is — or should have been — that the software you purchased to save everyone time is a great time saver once you get past working your fingers to the bone for the first thirty days.

I do think the effort will be worth it, however. I believe that a client who’s attracted to doing their own searching online is more or less an ideal candidate (compared to the general population) for being someone who might be interested in being able to track the status of their transaction online. So I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this as my team and I get our checklists set up and become more comfortable with the software.

In the meantime, here’s a flier (PDF) you can check out if you’re a buyer / seller and want to understand the benefits to you of having the ablity 24 x 7 to track your agent’s progress on your listing or real estate transaction. Or you can just click on the draft ad to the right, featuring Stressed-Out Sally, the Buyer who used a “B” agent instead of us.

There’s an online transaction management system that I’ve been thinking about using, SettlementRoom. One of my agents used to be a transaction coordinator early on and mentioned it to me. It allows a buyer or seller to securely track the progress of their transaction (or the feedback from agents on their listing) online. One of the complaints that sellers often have about their agent is that they failed to provide feedback from property showings from the buyers and other agents. Once you’re in escrow, it allows you to have all the paperwork in one central place, and allows us to provide you with a CD record of the whole transaction when it is done.

I know my colleagues read these blogs pretty heavily, but on the off chance that a potential client does as well, I’d love to hear you chime in and let me know if you think that would add value to our real estate service. The cost is certainly not prohibitive unless it just turns out to be a needless bunch of bells and whistles.

We’ve just completed the preliminary work on our Sacramento Real Estate Discount Newsletter, so be the first on your block to click on it, subscribe to it, and watch it become less cheesy right before your very eyes!

Yes, it’s dollar man, who disguised as John Lockwood, mild mannered broker for a great metropolitan real estate agency…

Well, most people who know me would go for “strange visitor from another planet”, at any rate.

Those of you who are just jonesing for the Superman theme at this point can go here.

I know I was.

It looks like I’ve finally found a solution to a problem that has haunted me since I launched my first real estate web site almost five years ago — what to do about those folks who come in at the very early stages of their real estate search and request information, such as signing up for a Property Organizer Account. I’ve never really felt like I’ve done a good job of making customers of the folks who are four to eight months away from buying something. I do a good job with folks who are ready to buy and call, but at any given time I suspect my web site consists of a visitor pattern something like:

• Ready to buy right now, or pretty darned quick. 10%
• Will be ready to buy, but not now. Using my web site for research. May or may not end up using me as an agent. 50%
• Other. High school kids doing homework, colleagues hoping I’ll write about them, and other assorted tire kickers. 40%

And that’s fine, really. I don’t mind the 40% kicking the tires, as long as there’s a 10% paying me to publish the tires. Helping some portion of that first 10% of my visitors is what’s kept me afloat for the past few years, but I’ve been awfully interested in what might happen if I could ever master the art of connecting with that middle 50%.

So far I honestly don’t think I’ve done a very good job of that, because I’ve alternated between not contacting them at all — a sort of Puritan Privacy Policy approach — and phoning them to welcome them to the site, which in sales etiquette terms is reminiscent of the Furniture Store Millisecond, named after the amount of time it takes a guy in the furniture store to get in your face and say “Can I help you?”

So, avid real estate sales Goldilocks that I am, I am now working very hard to split the difference between the too-cold porridge of hands-off, and the too-hot porridge of the welcome phone call. The answer, all along, has been a simple speedy response with a request to opt in to a permission-based newsletter. I’ve been testing out the services of GetResponse.com, and it’s looking like their system will enable me to put something together that is permission based and therefore extremely privacy-sensitive and user-friendly, yet still sales-effective. As a side benefit, it will also enable you (soon) to subscribe to the blog’s content, and doing so will also make you eligible to receive discount offers.

I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve got some typing to do!

My darling husband and I have finally put our working relationship into the form of a legal document to whit: I have agreed to do nothing solely and exclusively for John Lockwood Associates, dba Elite Properties and they have agreed to pay nothing for said work. The aforesaid agreement entitles me legally to blog about Real Estate (along with any other thoughts I care to share with you) here on the Sacramento Real Estate Blog.

I am looking forward to sharing my thoughts with you dear readers. Having successfully migrated to the greater Sacramento area a good ten years ago, I hope that you may benefit from my experiences here. For those loyal followers of my writings you can still see my older blog entries at my space under my nom de plume katatonia.

John Lockwood Associates is pleased to announce that we have just hired California’s most lovely real estate agent, Kathy Lockwood. Welcome aboard, honey.

Kathy may be chiming in on the blog if the spirit moves her, but (shrewd negotiator that she is) she may not.

It’s all good.