Sacramento Real Estate Blog

…money for God’s sake. So sang 10cc. You can look up anything on the Internet.

So that’s what I’m doing here later on a Friday. Grindingly, exhaustingly late on a Friday. Just cranking out a few words before calling it a night.

So how’d the broker’s exam go? Well, just fine, I suppose. Reasonably gruelling, really. Consumers, take heart, they just don’t give those brokers’ licenses away. Yet all in all, certainly not as hard as the state bar or med school. Definitely nowhere near as hard as as quitting smoking — now that was a challenge.

Anyway, by this time next week or thereabouts, we should know if I’m still a salesperson or have become a broker.

It’s kind of a strange goal, in a way, to have a broker’s license. To continue working at REMAX, I don’t need one — all the state requires when in the employ of a real estate broker is a “salesperson’s” license. From a press release sort of perspective, one might say that having a broker’s license gives me enhanced knowledge that let’s me serve clients better.

True enough, I suppose, but for that matter I’ve been working the Blogging / Web Development side of the business so hard recently that I let my team do just about all of the direct client work. Well, that’s the traditional role of the broker with or without the license — providing general advertising and rainmaking so that others can close the business. But that sort of begs the question, too, since REMAX’s team model pretty much lets me accomplish that even with a good old regular sales license.

I suppose off in the future I may well open up shop as John Lockwood Realty or the like.

Rejected names include “Honest John’s Used Houses” and “Low Tide Realty”.

There’s no tide in Sacramento to speak of. Maybe a smackerel of it down by the river.

I suppose what I think about most when I think along those lines is wanting to make sure I would have a better business model than I have now. (Because otherwise, of course, why do it?). One possible avenue to explore would be opening a thorough-going buyer brokerage. It turns out that working with buyers is 80% or so of our business anyway, and making it official might have advantages both for us and our clients. Another possibility that ties in nicely to a focus on buyer representation would be originating loans, but there’d be a learning curve there I suppose.

Of course I tend to see much of that challenge through the eyes of a web developer, too. One area of my site that I wish performed better is our loan prequalification form. We tend to get lots of inquiries via that form, but find that we actually refer out more bona fide loan business through our work with buyers who respond to our MLS real estate listing information. So I wonder how to make that better — perhaps as simply as calling it Loan Preapproval, but more likely through developing a more full blown loan application 1003 form processor. Actually I see a good one as being something I might offer as an ASP to Realtors®.

But that’s yet another project, isn’t it?