BASIC TRAINING: 7 STEPS TO BUILDING A SUPER TEAM IN 2017

TEAM: Together Everyone Achieves More

Cash Buyers Lists News

In the real estate industry, I’ve seen a lot of great people succeed-and a lot of great people burn out. The amount of pressure combined with straight commissions and the increasingly complicated nature of the transaction means it’s getting more difficult to do any significant number of transactions without getting some real help. When quality individuals begin to do real estate, they build their business based on a set of values and an intended level of service.

As they grow, their service suffers, or their values are compromised. I believe that we’re not on this earth to sell houses, but rather, to make a difference in the lives of our families, and the people we touch in business, in that order. As we grow, both areas suffer.

The Problem
I recently read an interview about an agent who is doing $10 million a year in sales. While this is a good business, she never sees her husband and misses all of her children’s games and important events. Success to her used to be measured by selling houses and being a great wife and mother. Today, she feels as though she’s failing at all three. This is the underlying motivator which drives people to consider building a team. As I continued to read, the interviewer made sure she understood she wasn’t alone in her feelings of being able to grow her business, but unwilling to have her family suffer going forward.


The Solution

Step 1: Look at company-provided tools and take advantage of the tools and resources available. These include marketing, transaction management, etc.

Step 2: Hire a Client Care Coordinator. This position can be full- or part-time, but should be filled from day one. I don’t believe you can get to the place in your business where you’re making $1,000 per hour if you spend 15 - 30 hours a week doing $15 - $20 per hour tasks. You must delegate and follow a proven process for hiring and training talent.

Step 3: Systematize everything. Automate your processes and systems to create operational excellence. This includes systems for in place before, during and after every transaction.

Step 4: Consider a buyer’s agent or showing assistant. I know through our tracking systems and research every listing should generate 1.5 buyer-side transactions. If you focus on listings and allow someone else on your team to show and work with buyers, you can grow substantially.

Step 5: Cater to millennials. Millennials love working in groups and helping each other be successful. This team environment is very difficult to achieve as a group of agents. Team means something entirely different than group, and building a team makes work more enjoyable, and, more importantly, gives you the ability to have someone you like and trust handle your clients when you need time with your family.

Step 6: Change your focus from agent to leader. Your focus should be on business development and people development. As you help your team members become successful, have great income and balance in their lives, your income and life balance will improve.

Step 7: Don’t go it alone. Building a team is like climbing Mt. Everest; many set the goal to reach the summit, but very few do. Your business, life and team deserve expert advice and coaching to follow a proven route to success.​​

​The bottom line is real estate professionals want a life. They realize their lives will not be measured by GCI (Gross Commissionable Income) or number of total units sold. Life has so much more to offer, and building a successful team allows them to live life to its fullest.

Verl Workman is the founder and CEO of Workman Success Systems, an international speaking, consulting and coaching company that specializes in performance coaching and building successful power agents and teams.
 
For more information, please visit www.verlworkman.com.

 www.CashBuyersLists.com  Like, Comment and Share

How do I invest in real estate with little to no money?

How do I invest in real estate with little to no money?

What if you were told you could get started in real estate with just $17?

Yes…you read that right, $17!

You’re probably thinking, “How can $17 get me in the real estate game?”

While it’s not $1,000,000, $100,000 or $10,000, hey, at least it’s something and never under estimate the value of a dollar.

Just because you don’t have much money to start investing in real estate doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start investing right away.

Actually, the most difficult part of investing in real estate is, “STARTING”.

For those of you who are discouraged because you only have a little bit of money to invest – don’t fret!

$17 can get you in the real estate game more than you realize.

 Here’s how:

1.       FIND REAL ESTATE CASH BUYERS

2.      Get Your Real Estate Cash Buyers' Parameters

3.      Contact an Agent or Broker

4.      Find the properties based on the parameters

5.      Run the numbers

6.      Make a bid and lock up the property

7.      Assign and flip your property to your cash buyer

...REPEAT

Take note, the first thing on the list is to FIND REAL ESTATE CASHBUYERS.

Cash Buyers Lists Never Buy A Home Without It!

You don’t want to purchase a piece of property if you don’t have a buyer already set up.  Here’s how your $17 can change the game of real estate for you.

Cash Buyers Lists provides verified real estate cash buyers in “any city” for “any state”.

That’s right, “ANY CITY FOR ANY STATE!”

Each real estate cash buyers list can contain up to 500 leads of verified real estate cash buyers who have purchased real estate for cash within the last 6 months.

So once you have your verified real estate cash buyers how do you contact them?

Depending on your Cash Buyers Lists package you will be able to obtain phone numbers for your leads.

Don’t wait another moment.  Get started by picking up your first real estate cash buyers list, NOW!

www.CashBuyersLists.com

Like, Comment and Share

WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS: HOMEOWNERSHIP AND PROFESSIONAL SUCCESS

Women Entrepreneurs: Homeownership and Professional Success

Cash Buyers Lists News

It's undeniable; women entrepreneurs hold tremendous potential for success and the American economy. Entrepreneurial women are starting over 1,100 businesses a day and women-owned businesses have increased 27.5 percent from just 2007 to 2012, currently numbering at 10 million, according to the Census Bureau.  However, this tremendous growth is eclipsed by the dire conditions with which women-owned businesses are faced. Here are two stark truths: 91 percent of women-owned businesses have no employees other than the owner and 88 percent of women-owned firms do not surpass the $100,000 revenue threshold. 

The majority of women-owned businesses are small businesses, and the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) Office of Advocacy reveals that of businesses started in 2014, a mere 9 percent survived until 2015. Compounded by the fact that women receive only 16 percent of conventional small business loans, 4.4 percent of the total dollar value of all small business loans, according to a 2014 Senate Committee report, this makes it extremely difficult for women entrepreneurs to make their businesses successes.

Access to capital is a serious issue for women-owned businesses. The National Women's Business Council (NWBC) reports:

• Women start businesses with half as much capital as men ($75,000 vs. $135,000).
• Women receive 0.1 percent of venture capital financing.
• Only 5.5 percent of women-owned businesses utilize business loans from banks to begin or acquire their business.
• 55.5 percent of women-owned businesses are launched through the use of personal savings.

Pervasive gender imbalances like these severely hinder the capabilities of women entrepreneurs. By raising women's access to capital, women become increasingly equipped to enter the business arena with security and succeed.  Women's progress has extensive effects and its ripples are evident in all generations, from college students to seasoned professionals. Women are advancing in their fields, increasing their wealth and simultaneously raising their capability to become homeowners.

The significance of homeownership cannot be overstated. Owning a home means achieving the American Dream and having a place to call your own; it builds wealth and secures your professional progress. For women, who face an imbalanced professional field and work hard for less money, becoming a homeowner is powerful.  How can we level the playing field for women entrepreneurs?

​Women must be able to utilize personal successes profitably in the business arena. In situations when they are denied loans, women entrepreneurs should be able to leverage achievements, like their status as homeowners and wealth, to obtain much needed business loans.

​It's all a cycle. The professional arena needs to be balanced so women are given equal opportunity to succeed. With success, women will be able to lead better lives through accomplishments such as homeownership, which will in turn beneficially poise women for business success.  But what happens when successful women don't appear to be so on paper?

We have seen how lack of accountability has caused a downturn in the housing market, but little has been said about the effect the recession had on financing for small businesses. With the impact of losing home equity, and, in a high number of cases, the home entirely, small business owners were devastatingly impacted.

Damaged credit has left hopeful homebuyers with bad FICO scores and business owners incapable of obtaining loans. Even though women are able to afford a home or repay a business loan, systematic roadblocks prevent them from being recognized as reliable consumers.  The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) reports that in 2013, 7.7 percent of American households (17 million adults) were unbanked and 20 percent (51 million adults) were under banked. This amounts to almost 70 million Americans who do not have full access to credit.

"We have millions of potential homebuyers, car buyers, and just plain consumers who do not qualify for financing or even credit cards because they don't fit within traditional credit definitions," states Rick Sharga, executive vice president at Auction.com, about an alternative credit scoring system being developed by FICO.

"Many of these individuals are perfectly good credit risks and have good incomes, but until this point they've been unable to get the benefit of their prompt payments and prudent financial management," Sharga continues. "There's an unfairness to this, which can be reduced with the use of alternative credit scoring, and today's big data solutions make the data needed to create this scoring readily available."  A change needs to be made to inflexible, inaccurate practices used to determine if a person is qualified for a mortgage or loan. The significant limitations to which capable consumers are being subjected are unjust. Homebuyers and professionals should not be held back from experiencing important life transitions simply because an antiquated system determines their credit score is not good enough.

Over the decades there have been many creative financing techniques, especially for residential purchases. Innovation in lending is needed now more than ever. Women must be given an equal chance to succeed, personally and professionally.  Homeownership and professional success go hand in hand; when a score on a sheet of paper prevents women from achieving either, alternative methods should allow them to leverage one in order to achieve the other.

DesirEe Patno is president and CEO of the National Association of Women in Real Estate Businesses (NAWRB).
For more information, please visit www.nawrb.com.

  www.CashBuyersLists.com  Like, Comment and Share

TOP 10 APPS FOR 2017 TO POWER UP YOUR REAL ESTATE BUSINESS

Top 10 Apps For 2017 To Power Up Your Real Estate Business

It’s that time of the year-a time to take inventory, and reflect on what has worked this past year, a time to look into new tools, solutions, and apps which will facilitate your business in the coming year. What better way to start 2017 than with the best apps recommended by other successful agents and brokers? Apps make life easy: they help us connect with others to share projects and ideas; they can save time, effort, and resources to make our lives easier and more efficient. In addition to our previous breakdown of real estate tools, here are some of the best apps available for real estate, recommended by top pros in the real estate industry.

A Picture Is Worth 1,000 Words
Real estate professionals rely on images to draw the attention of prospects, and being able to create pictures and images on-the-go is a must for 2017. Check out these apps that make it easy to create professional images and videos right from your phone, computer, or tablet.

PicPlayPost - Don't be dependent on buyers clicking through each individual image of your listing to get 

hooked! Incorporate photos, video, and audio into one incredible collage to highlight more of your listing features at a glance with this app.
Recommended by Marguerite Giguere
WordSwag - Add descriptions to listing photos or share inspiring stats, quotes, etc., as an image overlay to make your messages more relatable, digestible, and memorable.
Recommended by Debra Trappen
Haiku Deck - Haiku Deck offers access to thousands of templates and millions of free images to complement your branding, making it easy to create a professional looking presentation.
Recommended by Chris Smith
iMovie - Create, edit, share, and view videos on your iPad, iPhone, or Apple computer with this easy to use, all-in-one video app. Recommended byMarguerite Giguere

​There’s No "I" in Team
Teamwork is essential to running a successful real estate business, but hectic schedules make it hard to get everyone in the same place at the same time to coordinate. These apps make it easy to connect with your team on the go.
Evernote - Take, share, and access your ideas from anywhere with Evernote. This note-taking app makes note-taking easier by allowing you to make lists, take notes, and snap photos in a single app.
Recommended by Ashton Gustafson

Slack - You don't have to wonder who's taking care of what when you have open lines of communication with your team. Keep everyone on the same page with this user-friendly group messaging app.
Recommended by Michael Maher
GroupMe - GroupMe is a group messaging app which makes it easy to connect with your team on any device by creating a private chatroom for you and your team. Recommended by Wendy Papasan

Never Put Off Until Tomorrow What You Can Do Today
It seems like there are never enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to get done, and though they can’t create time, these apps can free up some time to help you achieve your productivity goals.​​

Charlie App - This app makes building rapport simpler by researching your contacts and sending you information about their interests, common connections, company, news, and more.
Recommended by Chris Smith
Don't Break the Chain! - Build good habits by tracking your daily commitment to your most important goal. 
Recommended by Wendy Papasan
Waze - Use Waze to navigate busy city streets and avoid traffic jams, accidents, and other road hazards to reach your destination fast, safe, and on time. Recommended by Debra Trappen
Homes.com is also offering a new app to instantly connect area agents with exclusive buyer leads who are looking at homes within five miles of the agents current location. TalkNow is currently being beta-tested in select markets. Find out more about getting the TalkNow app in your area.

Once you've downloaded your apps, check out the new 2017 Social Media and Business Planning checklists to expand your audience and stay up-to-date with fresh, innovative ideas. For even more ways to optimize your business, contact us at 888-510-8795 or by email at productinfo@homes.com.

For more information, please visit connect.homes.com.

www.CashBuyersLists.com

TECH-SCAPE COMPANIES INNOVATING REAL ESTATE IN 2016

TECH-SCAPE COMPANIES INNOVATING REAL ESTATE IN 2016

The featured product this month at the Center for REALTOR(R) Development at 25% off is the e-PRO(R) Day 1 and 2 bundle of online courses, which is the educational requirement for NAR'se-PRO(R) certification. This certification aims to help real estate professionals broaden their technology skills to connect effectively with today's digitally-savvy consumer. To match the featured course, all of our posts this month will be technology-focused. We'd like to begin with a contributed article from Jonathan Aizen from Amitree, whose Tech-Scape chart has been providing insight for years.

You may have heard: real estate technology is hot. Every year, at Amitree, they publish a chart of all the companies innovating the real estate process. That's 384 companies, with billions of venture capital dollars invested in technology which helps bring buyers and sellers together. But without a little bit of extra explanation and context, it's mostly just a collection of logos. To help make sense of it for you, let's focus on just a few of the categories which are making the most impact on agents’ lives today.  We’ve chosen a few categories which are particularly interesting this year and included some of the salient companies in each and hope to bring you more. In 2016, there was a lot of investment and hype around these categories:

Agent/Client Collaborative Search
Remember when listings were in physical books accessible only to real estate professionals? With the success of online search portals, many consumers now have the false impression that they have access to the same listing data as their agent. Collaborative search platforms like RealScout and Zurple put the agent back in the drivers’ seat to own the buyers search process (using the agents MLS). You get to see what they’re searching for and where they are in their search process at every step.

CRM/Lead Management Solutions
Lots of great companies are going after agent CRM. Placester and BoomTown are two of them coming at it from very different approaches. Often, these platforms also help take control of your inbound leads as well as your outbound marketing. That said, its a tough category-the most popular CRM system in any industry continues to be the humble spreadsheet.

AI/Agent Chat
Artificial intelligence is creeping into every industry. What does it look like in real estate? For now, it looks like smart chat bots that harvest your inbound leads and inquiries and guide next steps. You might even call these tools an automated assistant that helps you focus your time on the most promising leads. Check out Doss and Riley for early peeks at how this works.

Transaction Management Platforms
This category has been making more and more real estate offices paperless. Instanet, DocuSign, and dotloop are the leaders and focus mostly on document-signing. Beware of platforms that purport to do too much-many transaction management platforms also include CRM, lead management, and even marketing automation. Its difficult enough to do one of those well, let alone all of them.

Agent/Client Workflow
Transaction management platforms often aren’t the best client-facing tools for managing workflow. Hence, most agents adopt an ad hoc system of managing the workflow of the transaction with their clients using phone calls, emails, or hiring an assistant. A few use project management tools like Basecamp, and Amitree has built a workflow tool that plugs into Gmail for this (DISCLOSURE: I'm the CEO of Amitree).

Agent Websites
Placester and WebsiteBox both service IDX search-enabled websites as well as tools to manage leads once they come in via your website. Think of them like Wix or SquareSpace for real estate professionals.

3D Modeling Tools
I've saved the coolest for last. These are the companies you probably see advertising all over Facebook to make 3D walkthroughs of your properties. Matterport powers 3D listings, and despite their technology’s steep price tag, agents are harnessing 3D modeling to help drive more buyers to their properties.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of all the categories of real estate technology you should care about, but it’s a good place to begin to understand who is bringing innovation to the real estate process, or, in some cases, putting pressure on real estate practitioners to adopt innovative technology for themselves. Feel free to dig into the rest of the chart, and I’m happy to answer any questions via email.

Jonathan Aizen is the founder and CEO of Amitree, the makers of Folio http://www.amitree.com/, an automated workflow tool for busy real estate professionals. Jonathans technology experience extends beyond real estate, but his passion for connecting society with technology led him down a path aimed at improving the home buying process. Prior to Amitree, Aizen founded and sold an online advertising technology firm to Yahoo!, and the web giant kept him around to be general manager of its Smart Ads division. Aizen has been building websites and web companies since 1994 and learned to code when he was 8 years old. He is an advisor and mentor to a number of tech startups and established companies in the San Francisco Bay Area. Jonathan's email is jonathan@amitree.com.
 
The views and opinions in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the views and opinions of Center for REALTOR(R) Development or AZ Social Realty, nor constitute its endorsement of any specific product or service mentioned herein.

Cash Buyers Lists