Ben's Short Sale Insights

  Mail rental property owners info on other potential rentals for sale. This is so simple, but nobody does it. If a  property comes on your MLS that would cash flow as a rental property, just simply pull a list of other rental property owners (or duplex or multi-family owners) from the property a...

 Money Losing Advertising Mistake #1: Using the Helicopter Approach. “What is the Helicopter Approach”, you may ask. It's like getting in a helicopter, flying over town and just dumping your sales message out of the helicopter and hoping that it gets to a person that is interested in your product...

Today I wanted to put together a few items you can all use to list more expireds. Tip #1: Credibility. Now, what is credibility? Credibility is whether or not someone takes what you are saying as valid. According to the dictionary, credibility is defined as, “capable of being believed, believable...

 If you are thinking about sending any direct mail, then I am sure you want to know how you can figure out if you’ll make any money. First, let me go thru how I do my campaigns and how much they cost, and then I’ll show you what the payoffs have been. Right now we are mailing about 250 letters a ...

 It's true. I listed two homes last week. The sellers were former expireds that called me from a letter I sent them in the mail. Now, I'm sure you are thinking this doesn't work. But, it does. My assistant mailed this simple letter to all of the expireds we have gotten over the last month.  Four ...

 When we take a listing, we all want to know what the likelihood it has of selling. Today I am going to talk about something that we have noticed here in our market. The listings that have the most interest and sell the fastest are the less expensive homes close to town. I heard some news report ...

 A company used a sequence of six letters sent to prospective customers to increase their business by 500% in 15 weeks. The company was a service station in Toledo, Ohio located on the outskirts of town. Two strong selling points – the quality of the work and the reduced price – are the foundatio...

Send me your examples of banks losing money because they turned down a short sale. I've posted a few of my examples on the site for the entire world to see. See them here at http://www.BankFailBlog.com . People who have better information will make better decisions. All we are doing is making a t...

My Dad once said, "Ben, it doesn't matter if you were in the right when you're dead." We were talking about driving. I had complained about some moron driver who didn't yield when I had the right of way. It was a good point. You can obey all the laws and have the right of way. But, if another dri...

I've got an idea today that I'm sure is going to be controversial. The Realtor Code of Ethics states that: "Realtors, in attempting to secure a listing, shall not deliberately mislead the owner as to market value. This is under Standard of Practice 1-3. We are all having a problem with high BPOs....