John Branch's (rlsp) Blog

There is an absolutely wonderful new technology tool - Jott!  Using Jott, you can send text messages and/or reminders to yourself or others, create lists of things to do and schedule appointments - all with speech recognition.  Now for the best part: this tool is free! Jott works with Google Cale...

How to Pick a Successful Farm   Select a target area with at least 300 homes. Assume that the average turnover rate for Houston-area communities is 9%. Calculate the number of homes expected to sell each year (9% times the number of homes.) Determine the average selling price of homes that have s...

Another day of conflicting market forecasts.  Bernanke says things are starting to look up!  At the same time, the general economy is faltering.  Gas is at an all-time high, but pending home sales are up.  Then we see the 14% drop in home prices last quarter ... it's amazing we're not all running...

"It's not easy being green..." I think Kermit may have missed it.  It seems that it IS easy being green, and it's profitable too, so I hear.  NAR has focused on green housing boom, and many brokerages (and agents) are pursuing the Eco-Broker designation.  More and more agents are utilizing the "m...

I've been reading a lot of posts on lead generation.  Everyone wants to know what works best: bumper stickers, calendar magnets, car magnets, farming, networking, classifieds, ...  The list goes on and on.  While it is true that this is a lead generation business, we need to take a minute and det...

Every day we're bombarded with more "bad" news about the mortgage industry:  "Foreclosures up 27% ..." and so forth.  The problem I see is one of perspective.  Did you know that 99.5% of the mortgages in the Houston area are performing?  99.5%!  Since when is a foreclosure rate of 0.5% a crisis?!...

Well, they've done it again. Another "front-line" news story reports that there is a major slump in housing sales. The problem is that ALL real estate markets are local -- there is no such thing as the "national" sales figures. It makes about as much sense as talking about national zoning ordinan...

Here are the latest numbers about The Woodlands single-family luxury home market, with numbers and statistics pulled from the Houston Association of Realtors MLS (my own research): For homes priced between $500,000 and $750,000: average days on market was 78, and we currently have about 3.6 month...

As a fairly recent franchisee of Real Living, I was asked, "Why Real Living?" at Momentum (our annual convention) this past weekend.  Of course I started with the predictable answers of the technology we offer our agents and the agent-centric culture, but it is FAR more than that. So many real es...