In The Field: My Personal & Professional Life

With the World Series just ending, it's got me in the mood to reminisce about my sons' and my baseball trip this year. This was our fifth season of baseball park hopping and we took two separate trips to see four more major league baseball stadiums.  The first week of June we were at Safeco Park ...

Grammar Mistakes for Agents to Avoid    Complete Sentences - A sentence needs a subject and predicate (verb).   •1.     Comma Splice - I wrote an offer today, it was accepted by  the seller. •A.    Add a conjunction after the comma:         I wrote an offer today, and it was accepted by the selle...

Many of you will be receiving property taxes decreases for the next tax year because of the downturn in real estate market values.  Your tax bills will be mailed out soon, but you don't need to wait until you get your bill to see what your home's assessed value is for the 2009-2010 tax year.  To ...

Understanding Short Sales   Short sales are becoming a common way for homeowners to sell their homes when they find themselves in a situation in which they have to sell and they owe more than the house is worth in this market.  Short sales are a complicated and lengthy process and there are many ...

Can someone help me?  I am meeting an asset manager on Tuesday to try to become their preferred REO agent.  This is my first attempt at listing REO properties.  I need to know what I need on my resume and how I can prepare for the meeting.  Any input from the ActiveRain community would be so appr...

I've talked a lot about mission statements, goals and marketing plans which are so effective in taking your business to the place you want it. Don't stop there because usually these plans are done for a year at a time and if the plans are monitored daily, they can go by the wayside quickly.That i...

Continuing on with the next part of the business plan to the meat of the whole thing -the marketing plan portion. I will cut and paste examples of my actual plan because I think it will be easier for you to write your own if you can use one for reference.Listed below are the components that are i...

In November of 2006 I was about to leave real estate.  The previous 7 years had been a good run for me, but the market had changed and I was in a position I hated being in.  I was a single mother with not one lead in my pipeline.  It was scary, but I was lucky enough to have a plan B - I am a cre...

I read Elizabeth Nieves inspirational blog post about her plan to have an outstanding 2009, and she gave the credit to her creation of a solid business plan - plus a no-fail attitude.  I have no doubt that Elizabeth is going to have a very good year next year. I finished my 2009 business plan in ...

Thanks for all the comments on my short sale blog entry.  Many of you have dealt with short sales and said they can be a pain. Everyone agreed that we were going to be seeing more of them in the very near future.  Many of you asked me to provide any more information that I had on the subject.Here...