Realty World Northern California & Nevada

Now is not the time to play the victim. 

Realty World’s high caliber accountability-driven training began last week with the first of eight meetings and I must say it was very encouraging to see the positive, optimistic attitude of the attendees. No doom and gloom surfaced whatsoever; in fact, just the opposite. The room was filled with an air of success and a strong desire to build upon individual business models that just needed to be elevated to another exciting level.

As this new era of technology moves everyone to a quicker and more convenient way to communicate, shop, be social, and increase knowledge, the day has not disappeared where we should be personally in front of people in some form or another.

There is a great need for self-discipline. We must be responsible for the outcomes we experience. We need to instill a belief in ourselves that we have the power to create the circumstances which will fortify our business model. Positive expectations will create focused and positive results.

With the well-designed office and agent websites that we are providing to our brokers and agents comes the understanding that we still need basic principles set in place amidst this advanced age we are doing business in. We still need to be out meeting and greeting customers in order to establish rapport, educate them and give direction. We need to seek and find a need that has to be addressed. Isolate indifference in order to allow a very clear picture of what needs to be handled. Once we have met our clients’ expectations, only then can we reassure them that we will provide the care and quality service they deserve with a well thought out Action Plan.
 
Brokers and agents today need to be regimented in their finances. Something that I learned long ago was a business derived from doing daily initiatives in the form of referrals to make sure a certain percentage of the commission goes into a retirement fund.

Upward and Onward…

Dennis Stewart
Vice President & Regional Director
Dennis.Stewart@rwnc.net

I’ve seen most of you over the past several months at different functions that I’ve held. As all of you know, I’m a very candid speaker and I come from a belief structure that anything can be done no matter what obstacles are in front of you. That doesn’t mean it won’t be harder or take twice as much work to do it, but if you truly want to achieve something, you and you alone will end up being the reason for success or failure. For six months now, I have been hammering into everyone’s heads that our online presence is one of the largest provided by any real estate company in the U.S. I have been stating that you should go out in the field and use our new National Listings Distribution Program sheets we provide all of you, and get it in front of every consumer you can. We all know that just about every consumer in the U.S. who owns a house wants their home listed on as many real estate websites they can find. Consumers do a ton more research about real estate then they did even five years ago. If you just show potential sellers how we market properties on the Internet, YOU WILL GET BUSINESS! The question, once again, comes down to: “Are you showing them?”

Let me prove my point. One of our brokers sent me an email a few days ago stating that he farms specific neighborhoods with postcards that he created specifically about National Listings Distribution Program and how, if they list with him, he will give them online exposure that no other real estate company can compete with, thereby providing a greater chance of bringing in more buyers and potentially selling their home much faster. Here is a quote from his email: “I have listed and sold approximately 7 listings in this neighborhood in the last 10 months since I started farming it.” That is a pretty amazing number considering none of them are foreclosures! You see, all he is doing is taking business away from his competition. Instead of seeing more competitor signs in the neighborhood, you just see more Realty World ones! In addition to his success, he forces his agents to actually walk neighborhoods with the same postcards and this is another quote from his email: “So far since we started this a week ago, four of my agents are already working on clients generated from these postcard handouts.”

The moral to the story… the real estate market is only as dead as you make it. If you want to do more business, go figure out a way to take the business away from your competition, or simply use the one we just gave you. If you take on this philosophy, you will have more transactions this year than you know what to do with.

James Dwiggins
Chief Strategy Officer
James.Dwiggins@rwnc.net

With all the news and activity swirling around the foreclosure basin, it is important to consult sellers who are contemplating a short sale appropriately. First, there may be legal and tax consequences which may affect them and you should always refer a seller to their lawyer or accountant before going any further in the process to discover potential problems.

Second (this is for buyers or sellers), short sales generally are not… well, short. They can take substantially longer than one might have the patience or time for — sometimes as much as three to four times longer to close than a traditional transaction. This will certainly have a material weight on your decision process too.

Candidates for a short sale will be scrutinized by the bank thoroughly. There has to be substantial proof of hardship to get a principal reduction off the original note, which really means one simply can’t make the payments at all and, thus, can’t perform to pay the loan.

The bank will require tax returns, pay stubs, W-2’s, bank and investment statements (both current and a history); they want to make sure money has not been moved recently that could have paid the debt.

Typically, if there is a forgiveness of principal versus a foreclosure the credit report won’t be damaged as bad; however, it will suffer from remarks that would show a future lender that there was a history of repayment problems. This obviously becomes problematic in seeking financing in the future.

The last important piece of the short sale puzzle is the Tax Man. In 2007, there was a revision to the tax code that basically said there would be no tax on any debt forgiveness.  This is generally for the seller of a primary residence though. In cases involving an investment or vacation home, there are more hoops to jump through. The IRS demands that you prove complete insolvency before they will consider letting the tax go.

These are critical points we think you should be aware of before advising anyone contemplating a short sale.

Scott LeForce
President
Scott.LeForce@rwnc.net