Sacramento Real Estate Blog

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!

Several months ago, I visited the subject of being able to provide buyers and sellers with the ability to sign their documents online. Recently when I was working with Mathew and Minie, the benefit of having the abilility to do this became even more apparent, because Mathew asked the (quite reasonable) question — Why aren’t Realtors® doing this yet? Look, you can do your taxes online, why can’t you sign your real estate paperwork the same way if you want?

When I last looked into this, I decided that the time and effort involved were not worth the trouble, because the main company that supported our real estate forms software had what I thought was a fairly kludgey solution requiring you to drag and drop electronic “sign here” stickies on each page. That’s not too onerous in itself, of course, but with a minimal purchase agreement weighing in these days at some 22 pages or so with disclosures, and given the fact that the last thing we want to do is hold up a buyer who’s ready to go, the process seemed to me to be too time consuming to be worthwhile.

I am happy to report, however, that our main electronic signatures provider, DocuSign, has recently released a Beta version of some software that’s destined to make this process much easier and faster to use, so that I think we’re ready to start serious work on rolling this out and making it available. This doesn’t mean that you have to use electronic signatures, of course — if you’re more comfortable working in person or by fax, of course we’ll still do business that way as well. I strongly suspect, however, that a lot of the folks who are users of this web site are the type of people who would find the convenience of being able to do their real estate paperwork online to be a real plus. For example, we often show people homes who live out of the area and who only decide on a purchase once they’ve gone home and “slept on it.”

Email software and web browsers have long ago replaced the fax machine as the communication medium of choice for many people. It’s time that Realtors® caught up with that, it seems to me, and got ourselves out of the dark ages.

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.

I enjoyed fifteen seconds of fame among my colleagues recently thanks to the benevolent auspices of The Tomato, real estate’s best marketing blog.

I wanted to thank everyone who put up with my heterodox ideas there, especially Jonathan Greene, author of the Tampa Real Estate Blog: Real Opinionated, who had to put up with me twice, Teresa Boardman, resident Eskimo of the frigid tundra of St. Paul, Minnesota, Ben Kakimoto, who blogs about condos in Seattle, Maureen Francis, who’s putting my production to shame in Oakland County, Jonathan Dalton, who’s got his capitalist head on straight in Phoenix, Joe Zekas, expert on Chicago neighborhoods, Marty Van Diest, who unlike Teresa services the temperate Wasilla, Alaska, just a stone’s throw north of Anchorage, assuming you can chuck a stone about fifty miles, and who also chimed in recently with some helpful advice about the transaction management software I’m considering, and I owe him a comment there.

And if I missed thanking anyone, I’m very sorry, but it’s 1:15AM here in the Big Tomato. Do you know where your buyers are?

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.

It gives me great pleasure to welcome Vicki Babcock to Elite Properties. Vicki and I go back a bit — especially in Internet time. (For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, Internet time is kind of like dog years).

When I began my career in real estate at ERA back in 2002, Vicki had already passed the twenty year mark in the business. Of course, I found that out later. I first met her only as this really pleasant, low-key agent in my office. Vicki has this way of putting everyone she meets at ease in about a minute and a half — if you last that long.

Fast forward to 2004, and Vicki and I were becoming friends and had moved on to REMAX Gold to launch the Real Estate Plus Team together, which I felt (and still do) was a great success. Two years later still in early 2006, when I decided that with the stress of the market I needed to go it alone again, Vicki took it in stride and — like any really good friend — was able to look past my imperfections, so we continued to work together to get things done for our clients whenever we could.

So anyway, here we are in 2007, and I am really grateful for the good fortune that has come to me. In fact, the way 2006 unfolded, I really feel a lot like Forrest Gump. I just sort of stumbled around trying to get by in a changing market, and the next thing you know I had this team of exceptional Realtors® working with me. Now with the addition of Vicki we’ve more than doubled our collective real estate experience, and welcomed back a really fine agent and friend.

So who was the luckiest man on earth. Lou Gehrig?

I think it’s me.

Elite Properties is delighted to announce that we have hired an outstanding Sacramento Realtor®, Susan Norris. Susan is one of the hardest working agents I’ve ever met, and she has a truly optimistic attitude that makes her a joy to work with.

I first met Susan when she was working for REMAX Gold in Sacramento, and I was working for REMAX in Cameron Park. At the time I had a listing on a duplex, and I met Susan when she represented the buyer on the transaction. Susan is a real estate investor herself, so she brings that valuable experience to bear when representing her investor clients. More importantly to me at the time, Susan struck me as an agent who did a fine job for her client without a lot of the egotism that sometimes plagues otherwise efficient agents in our business. Where other agents would create problems, Susan was always open to solving them so that the transaction would have a smooth, enjoyable, and successful outcome for everyone involved.

Because of this, when I later created a team at REMAX and then went off on my own as a broker, I often relied on Susan to handle some of the overflow for me when I would get especially busy. She always did a fine job of connecting with buyers, showing them what they wanted them to see, counselling them on their options, and helping them close escrow on the home of their dreams.

Unlike many of us, Susan doesn’t live in the suburbs, but instead has a home located pretty much in the heart of things in East Sacramento. She grew up in the area, and because of this and her many years of experience both as a Realtor® and investor, she knows the inventory in Sacramento County extremely well, but like all the agents in my company she’s not afraid of a little bit of travel to get the job done for a seller or buyer. Her humor and goodwill are infectious, and I consider it a huge win for the company as well as a personal pleasure to have her as part of the Elite Properties team.

One of the real technical / managerial / social challenges that I have been giving a lot of thought to these last few weeks is the idea of how one might build a technologically savvy real estate company on the Internet. Part of this is driven by the simply mechanical question of working out how my compensation program will work for the blog I’m sharing with Bridget. Part of it is driven by considerations that are larger in scope.

The problems that I’ve run into in trying to start a more “company-wide” sort of web presence are partly technical, but I think those are the easiest to solve. My IDX provider, IHomefinder, now tells me that they can track (albeit it in a non-automatic way), the leads that are generated from a given campaign. This means that in principle one could build a very low cost company site and let agents link to it from their individual sites and still gain the generated lead. Those agents could use a variety of strategies to drive traffic to their own sites. Pay per click. Blogging for dollars. Article submissions. All the usual suspects.

Moreover, it’s possible one could work the site as a community blog, which could serve as an adjunct to agent’s individual blogging efforts — a sort of Metrolist-only ActiveRain, if you will. Wordpress multi-user would support this kind of thing nicely, and it’s probably a pretty tractable solution for a nerd like me.

So the problems around such an approach are, it seems to me, more cultural and managerial in nature than strictly technical. If you have a tech savvy broker who could pull it off, would agents want training on the relevant techniques and would they be willing to sign the NDAs and “Your broker owns it if you quit on him” sort of language to protect the broker? And if they wouldn’t, how does the broker protect himself once he’s spilled all his trade secrets in weeks of agent SEO classes? Can you hire enough people — or teams of people — who combine the necessary sales and writing skills to pull it off effectively? What do you do about productive sites that agents already bring to the team? In other words, how can the broker optimize those to help his agents while mitigating the competitive risk to his own positions? I suspect that ultimately you’re forced into the same sort of geographical-splitting-up that brokers did back in the old “lead farming” days. “You take the east side, Bill, and Jane over here will take the west side”. But if you do that, certainly the guy who ends up with the blog for Oak Park is a bit less motivated than the owner of the Granite Bay blog.

Anyway, I’m not sure of the answers to all these questions. But as long as you’re not commenting on something, I thought I’d at least try to come up with something worth not commenting on.

Or who knows, maybe you’ll surprise me.

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.

I have a couple of hours here before getting ready for a New Year’s Eve day showing of several homes in Folsom. I’m going to spend it doing a couple of year in review articles. Market watchers may want to watch for the Sacramento County real estate year in review that I’ll do in a few minutes, but I thought I’d write a few personal notes first. On a blog, of course, you want your best effort last because that will push it to the top.

My personal year in review is a very interesting one, I think, in that this was the year that my love-hate relationship with real estate as a career finally resolved itself and pointed more strongly toward one side than the other. By now it’s pretty clear to me: I love this work. I had to go back into the faux comfort of software engineering one more time to realize it, and that final brief trip reminded me of what I didn’t like about that non-sales job: the disconnect between competence and effort on the one hand and earnings on the other. Tom Hopkins talks about the main benefit of sales being that the two are intimately related. (That’s also the main drawback of sales, by the way). Speaking one more time of software: I noticed just now that the company that believed my cheap foreign competitor’s estimate that their site would be done in two weeks has yet to see a launch of that site six months later. Hooray for globalization.

Interestingly, getting back into software ocurred right around the middle of the year. I believe, and will try to show in my next article, that this was also the nadir of the real estate market here. At the very beginning of the year, I was working at REMAX as a team leader for the Real Estate PLUS Team, but my overall production was suffering from my failure to take better control of my incoming leads, and my team was pushing back as I tried to remedy this. A couple of months into the year, the strain of this effort led me to decide to go off on my own as an individual agent at REMAX, and this move gave my sales a temporary boost while wearing me down to the point where software became attractive again.

While working this software opportunity, I did something that in retrospect turned out to be a very good idea, setting up John Lockwood Associates as a California Corporation and striking off on my own. My initial thought was simply to sell referrals and save on expenses, but as the software job turned out to be yet another rat race against cheap Elbonians [yes, I hate Web 2.0 but I LOVE Wikipedia!], a couple of weeks later I found myself flying without a net once more. After a few confused weeks writing some dumb .NET app that eventually got replaced by a less than $300 per year Application Service Provider, I decided to put on a blue suit and go to the Stardust Ballroom once more, i.e., climb back in the car and start peddling wooden shelters again.

That’s worked out extremely well. It was the best real estate Christmas ever. God bless us, everyone.

Looking back, this success also coincided with a period of some good Boddhichitta development on my part (that’s not a bad article as it applies to martial arts — it applies well to real estate, too). If I could extend that to Web 2.0, I’d be really cooking.

While this was happening, another wonderful thing came to pass. Bridget joined me, and so did Elite Properties. So in the course of the year, I’ve come full circle — leader of a real estate team, individual real estate agent working for another broker, get the heck out of this job, independent real estate broker on my own, and leader of a real estate team again.

My personal journey in real estate in the year behind was not much different from many agents in the business, who move when the markets shift either toward a second income or toward greater professionalism in real estate, or both. As a businessman, I belive in 2007 I need to grow both as an individual performer and as a team leader. The lesson I learned from the first team was that doing another salesperson’s prospecting for them is like giving a man a fish — pretty soon you run out of fish. So this year I’m experimenting with teaching others how to fish. But I’m not counting on their fish. I’ve got my own fish.

However, to my fellow area real estate bloggers out there, lest I forget — HELP WANTED: Fishermen. Inquire at (530) 672-9160. (The pier’s getting pretty crowded, so my new business model is to own the pier — not bad, huh?)

Have a great year everybody!

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!

Permission is hereby granted to re-publish the following press release in its entirety:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 22, 2006
John Lockwood Associates and Elite Properties Merger

John Lockwood Associates, a California Corporation with headquarters in El Dorado County, announced today that its merger with Elite Properties in Amador City has been completed. The merger began with our strategic hiring of Bridget Felmley-Gay, one of the Elite Properties founders, and negotiations with the former managing broker to continue to use the name in Amador County. Our fictitious business name was registered in El Dorado County, and has now been officially recognized on our Department of Real Estate License.

John Lockwood, the broker of record, had this to say,

“The completion of this merger is a strategic win for our company in several respects. First, our hiring of Elite Property’s founder, Bridget, gets our recruitment efforts off to an ideal start by serving as a model first hire for the very type of motivated and entrepreneurial agent that can help our company be successful long into the future.

“Equally as important, our acquisition of a branch office in Amador County now enables us to serve a huge five-county area including Sacramento County, El Dorado County, Placer County, Amador County, and eastern Yolo County. This is especially important given that our Internet presence means we work with many out of area buyers who have not yet decided which local community is right for them. Our new Amador County office strengthens our competency in rural and agricultural sales, vineyards, land, acreage, and horse properties.

“As an added bonus, our use of the Elite Properties name gives our agents the opportunity to participate in the business without feeling like they’re required to advertise the broker’s ego — agents are free to use either the Elite Properties name or the John Lockwood Associates name in their marketing. Since real estate agents are independent contractors, many are sensitive to the need to establish a ‘brand of their own’, and the Elite Properties name allows them the freedom to do this.”

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.

 

With special thanks to Knute Rockne, who got it wrong.

Hey, now there’s a good idea.

If I’m going to start recruiting and training, and thinking about tasks that I need to do to make us successful as an organization, then it helps to have an “Our Company” section here on the blog.

There’s something unusually compelling about having your “Company Intranet” on a blog. On the one hand there are probably some dark company secrets that shouldn’t go here. The C.E.O. is fat, for example.

Don’t tell anyone that.

On the other hand, having the company’s laundry here really fits with what I’m starting to perceive has been my core strength all along: open, honest sharing of information. People are starting whole blogs dedicated to this topic these days, but it’s something that my clients have told me they’ve appreciated all along. It starts with making the same listings I have access to available to you, and it continues through every aspect of the transaction.

I often joke around about company mottos, such as this page I wrote about Company Mottos We’ve Rejected. But lately I’ve felt very strongly about a motto that ocurred to me, strongly enough, that as Fraser Beach is fond of saying, “That’s our story, and we’re sticking to it.” So until someone shakes my conviction, the company motto in the following post is what our company motto is.

I was just working on a draft of my proposal about helping my agents out with their web marketing, and one of the first things that became obvious is that much of what’s really at the core of this issue is the need to recruit and train the right people.

Probably doing this right means focusing on recruiting and training. OK, fine, if I do that, who’s minding the store?

I wonder if Susan Norris and Gena Riede know each other. Also I wonder if Gena ever reads me. I hope she does.

Also I know Mike Jalone reads me, but I never followed up on trying to get Julie working here.

Rumors of the strange charisma that I have over agents the world over are greatly exaggerated. Really, I’m no more charismatic than other historical figures. I don’t know who starts this nonsense.

Meantime I have to figure out what this document is supposed to say and then get Bridget to help me decide what it should have said.

Then probably I should just go work on my “we’re hiring” page. I don’t even have such a page. That’s just wrong, because we are. We, you know, me and all my associates. Bridget.