AGBeat Columnist: Ben Martin
Writer for national real estate opinion column AgentGenius.com, focusing on the improvement of the real estate industry by educating peers about technology, real estate legislation, ethics, practices and brokerage with the end result being that consumers have a better experience.
Nationally, 8% of REALTORS Write Blogs. So What?!?
photo cred NAR released its 2008 member profile recently. One of the most significant findings, for this crowd anyway, will be the number of agents who are blogging. At 8 percent of 1.2 million REALTORS, we now have 96,000 REALTOR-bloggers pecking away on a keyboard and clicking publish. That’s almost three times as many members as Virginia Association of REALTORS ...
Got a Lead? How Long is it?
I just love the retro AgentGenius logo: That orange guy running out in front of all those gray guys. Go orange guy, go! It’s a apt metaphor for any business, really — staying at least a few steps ahead of your competition. That’s the gist of it, anyway. How long is your lead? Which begs the question: How far ahead ...
What do You Wish Your REALTOR® Association Staff Knew?
Photo credit Why Wont They Hear Me? Isn’t this how life works? You suggest, recommend, implore that someone do something a certain way. They resist, never doing it like you think they ought. Then, someone form another place in their life, maybe an outsider or someone they know from another context, asks them to try the same #*@&%$ thing and ...
New 2012 AGBeat media kit available now
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REALTORS® Worth 300 chickens & Then Some
photo cred Phraseology VAR’s sometimes-wacky special counsel (you know, the one who utters the words Kama Sutra in a webcast about the ethics of short sales) is fond of talking about agent commissions and offers of compensation in terms of chickens. 200 chickens to the buyer agent and so forth. For the purposes of this post, I’m borrowing his phraseology. ...
Agent’s remarks: Be aware there are dead animals and sex toys in the home
I came across these two funny blog posts recently about weird stuff found in sellers’ homes. Playboy Bunnies on the light switch face plates, handcuffs on the bedposts and (with apologies to hunters) Bambi’s dad’s head affixed to the wall. What’s the weirdest stuff you’ve seen in a seller’s house?
Measuring Return on Investment in Social Media Marketing is Fuzzy Math
Try Return on Engagement instead Dustin and Rob have an interesting conversation going on about measuring ROI in Social Media. I’m increasingly perplexed by this concept. How do you measure “investment” in social media? A wordpress.com, blogger.com or ActiveRain blog costs exactly $0. Let’s say you get one deal per year by blogging. A facebook profile costs you exactly $0. ...
The Water’s Fine in This Pool…
…Why the REALTOR association trifecta is the best in the land All throughout high school and quite a bit of college, I was a lifeguard. I started out guarding the lives the neighborhood kids at my community pool. My community pool was not connected to a homeowners association. You had a choice about joining, and it was a fun pool, ...
NAR should defend Lechuga
Use of NAR funds for blogger’s legal defense could turn the RE.net into NAR advocates photo credit: Lechuga’s blog If NAR ever had a chance to turn the legions of REALTOR bloggers who loathe its existence into raving NAR fans in one fell swoop, this is it. Defend Lucas Lechuga. When cases against its members and boards go to the ...
Where are they now?
Loudoun County foreclosure expert wins round one against assessor Todd Kaufman I recently caught up with Danilo Bogdanovic, the heroic Loudoun County foreclosure expert who stared down the county assessor, winning the first round in a battle that has died down, for the moment anyway. With his permission, I’m sharing his story. I’ll not cover ground that has already been ...
REALTORS and their associations share a common problem.
What we have here is failure to communicate. For the most part, I have come to enjoy reading real estate blogs since coming to work for the Virginia Association of REALTORS. However, it’s a de-motivating pain in the arse reading the RE.net sometimes. Every few days or weeks it seems someone’s hating on the REALTOR associations again. One complains that ...
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