Category Archives: Inspiration

Communication, education, Inspiration, planning, tips

Are you ready for today’s buyer’s wish list?

Leave a comment

Green HouseToday’s buyers are well informed and doing their homework before they even starts looking at any homes.

Your home needs to stand out from the crowed not only in “person” but also online.

Three major factors today’s buyer is looking for are the Price, Condition and Location of the home. As a seller you cannot influence the location of the home. You have a lot of influence over the Condition and the Price.

When it comes to location buyers are closely paying attention to the neighborhood the home is located at. They are deciding on the look and feel of the neighborhood. Is the areas well taken care off or do you see overgrown and “unkempt” yards. The other deciding factor is becoming more and more the availability and the ease of public transportation.

When it comes to price buyers crave the rock bottom pricing of the fixer uppers but would like to have the convenience of a ready-to-move-in home. Buyers also take more and more into consideration the cost of owning a home including taxes, cost of utilities and size. The larger the home the more you might need to spend on utilities. Many buyers have opted for a smaller home, that is maybe a more environmentally friendly home and might cost a bit more to buy. LEEDS certified home sales have outpaced in many areas the sale of “normal” homes.

When you have a floor plan that is broken down into formal room this, and formal room that, you might consider a small renovation if feasible. Today’s buyers are all for open floor plan and open connectivity. They no longer like to hide in the kitchen in the backroom when they have guest in the front room or outside on the deck.

More and more buyers are looking for a home that has two Master Suites due to some families combining households for the elderly parent or adult children moving in or just come to visit.

commitment, Communication, education, Inspiration, organizing, planning, Team work, tips

Don’t be afraid to network

1 Comment

We all do it !!!  Networking!

Some of us better than others and some of us don’t realize we are doing it every day.

Just having lunch with friends or family is a form of networking. You are getting the word out about what you do and who you are looking for. It always comes up during casual conversation.

Watching the kids at a sporting event is a form of networking. You usually make connections on a personal level with the other individuals who are at the event. Going shopping can be easily an event for networking.

Some of us are connected through social media and that is also a form of networking.

OK
now what we do with all of our connections we have accumulated?

When you speak with active networkers they will most likely throw the Givers Gain tagline at you. It is much more than that and I found a good example in an article I have read on the website “Addicted 2 Success” called “13 ways to unlock the hidden power of your Network to increase your net worth”

  • Assess the barriers that are holding you back
  • Define your core passions and purpose with the Funnel Test
  • Create a mind-set of positive productivity
  • Develop a Give Give Get attitude
..yes givers gain is also part of the mix 
..
  • Commit to shaking it up. Get out of your daily routine.
  • Accelerate your connections with technology
  • Cultivate relationships that support your purpose. Keep your core circle of networkers close and your secondary cycle close on hand.
  • Visit power pockets to accelerate networking
  • Hone your connecting skills and learn from hub players
  • Create content, products, or services to share your purpose
  • Develop partnerships to extend your reach
  • Learn to make successful asks.
  • Decide what brings you happiness and success: head, heart, or wallet?

 

Networking is a team sport and Jack Welsh put it best:

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. —Jack Welch

commitment, Communication, education, Inspiration, organizing, planning, Team work, tips

What type of Boss are you?

Leave a comment

newspaperHaving been on both sides of the fence during my work career I recently stopped and contemplated about what type of boss I am.

Reading a lot of articles from different sources I came across an article that was posted in the Fox Small Business Center called “10 things great bosses do” and used their list to see where I am standing.

The 10 trades they listed were:

  • Holding yourself accountable
  • Don’t be full of surprises
  • Be prepared to fix things
  • Know and have a feel for your business
  • Get the job done
  • Manage effectively in every direction.
  • Be able to make quick and informed decisions, even when they are not popular
  • Be effective not productive and stay flexible.
  • Live for your job by being engaged, empowered, driven, and self-motivated
  • Make sure you keep your sense of humor, have humility, empathy and learn about your own limitations and fallibility.

 

Looking at this list I can see I still have room for improvement on the other hand I can personally see how far I have come.

 

In matter to grow a business we have to be willing to grow ourselves.

commitment, Communication, Inspiration, organizing, planning, Team work, tips

Who has your back while you are out?

Leave a comment

SoHands touching a globemetimes there comes a time where you will be out of your office for an extended period of time. Is it maybe for business, pleasure, family or health related reasons.  This goes for anyone who is employed or self-employed alike. Sometime we all just need to take a break.

During the time you are absent especially when you are employed you know that your employer will make sure that your position is covered and when something arises during your absent that it is going to be covered and it will be taken care off.

How about the individuals who are self-employed? You do need a break and you do need to take time off, even when it is for a few days.

Who has your back while you are out?

 

Here are several Ideas and tips to make sure you can take a few days off and hopefully relax for a few days.

 

  • Inform your customers that you will be away and give them a contact person in your absence.
  • Give the contact person full authorization to pull any needed information in a possibility that one of the clients does need anything while you are out.
  • For potential call in’s make sure you have that contact personal name and number available on your voice mail or to the answering service you might using.
  • When you self-employed and you are part of an office like with real estate. Make sure the office knows who to contact while you are out.

Keep in mind, even when you are self-employed you need to have a team around to support you !

 TEAM

T- Together

E- Everyone

A- Achieves

M- More

Inspiration, organizing, planning, tips

Your house needs to be the seductresses to attract buyers

Leave a comment

Many homeowners who are planning on selling a home are focusing on all the fixed and repairs they have to do on the inside and forgetting to keep up with the look and repairs on the outside.

No matter how great your home looks on the inside, when you do not have the inviting seductive outside, a potential buyer might not step foot in your home or might not make an offer due to the lack of appeal on the outside.

You can hire a landscaping company to help you, but you truly don’t have to.

Personal I have found that when after leaving town for a while and coming back was the time for a new set of eyes to look at a home. Did you like what you see or did you have the sinking feeling looking at your home after being gone for a while? Did you fall again in love with your great looking home or did you have the blah feeling because your home looked just like all the others on the block.

The greatest indicator that your home needs a bit more curb appeal is when you give directions to friends and family member based on a balloon tied to the mailbox or having to put a sign in the yard for them to be able to find you.

Some of the fixes can be as simple as adding different landscaping to a yard or changing the paint of the front door and either loosing or updating the current shutters.

Here are some examples:

           house 2 before       house 2 after                          house 1before      house 1 after

Communication, education, Inspiration, organizing

Have your home outshine the things you cannot control

Leave a comment

Now for some time the current market has been due to lower interest rate and lack of availability of listed homes a sellers’ market. Still not every seller will see an offer or even multiple offers on their home even so their home shows on a consistence bases and has a lot of traffic of potential buyers.

There could be many reasons why some homes are off the market within 48 hours after there are listed and other still have not seen an offer even after 2 months or longer within the same zip code, area or even neighborhood.

Homeowner’s who are planning on selling their home quickly needs to look at their own house with a critical eye of a potential buyer. You can control many things on why a house might not see an offer right away and there others you have no control over.

 

Take control over what you can control before listing your home. Have your home outshine the things you cannot control.

commitment, Communication, education, Inspiration, organizing, planning, Team work

Growing personal and in your business needs a plan

1 Comment

We all have heard the saying “when it is not written down it is not going to happen” or the other “ make a plan, write down the plan and execute the plan” but how many of us are sometimes shooting from the “hip” and shoot at an unidentified target and miss.

Some of the plan for any company should also be company grows through personal and income. All of this should have a plan that is clear and well laid out with a certain goal in mind.

For instance a home based business could have the goal of moving into an office space within 5 years.

Here is the goal and now you need to put the action steps into place to achieve the goal.  You might have to identify coaches, mentors, or advisors you need to consult to achieve your goal. Make sure everything is written down and easy accessible to yourself for a frequent check on how you are doing.

You might have a partner who checks on you to find out if you are still on track or if you have strayed from your path.

Part of the goal should be also the internal grows of your internal sales force and I found that the article by Chris Simone titled 5 tips to building an inside sales force gave great Ideas as a recruiter or business owner on how to tackle the sales force growth.

I always said that any grows is a team sport and there is no “I” in Team and have written about this in a blog post called “TEAMWORK
a lost art?”

education, Inspiration, organizing, planning, Team work, tips

Control what you can control

Leave a comment

An article about 9 things that will trash your home value from Mandi Woodruff came across my desk. Some of the things they listed where loud neighbors, foreclosure in the neighborhood and hoarders. This made me think, not only about the housing market but also about running a business.

What could be the things that will trash your business?

My first thought goes immediately towards the total loss of information and documentation due to a natural disaster like fire, flood, or storm. Or possible more manmade disasters like power outage, back-up failure, you name it.

There is also the possible personal accident or medical emergency that could keep you from tending to your business when you don’t have plan B in place.

Some other internal business wreckers for some business could be the improper disposal of chemicals or cleaners or employees who are not quite as honest  and maybe taking a switch here , a gallon of paint there or eating an unauthorized free meal here or giving their friends a free lunch there.

The other thing that comes to mind is not keeping up with changes or keeping up with continues education and changes in technology or becoming just plain complacent and set in the personal way of doing things.

Some of the things we can control in in some way but there will be some things we have absolute no control over and we just need to take the bull by the horn and deal with them or ignore them when appropriate.

commitment, Communication, education, Inspiration, planning, tips

Are women businesses less credit worthy?

Leave a comment

I don’t think so but it appears we are losing some ground.

Catching up on reading news clippings I have collected and I ran across another eye opening article about a study from Biz2Credit posted in the Bloomberg Business Week. Biz2Creidt analyzed 14,000 loams and found out that women-owned companies were 15 percent to 20 percent less likely to be approved for small business loans within the first 6 months of 2012.

They put some of the blame on the type of business a woman is planning on opening. Most of the women part of the loans they looked at where planning on opening a retail location, which normally does not have a lot of ROI and higher expenses.

Did you know that U.S. government contracts to women- owned small businesses dropped for the second consecutive year, declining at a faster rate than awards to their male counterparts?

Sure there is less contractual work to give out and the competition has increased and the government never focused very strongly on women owned businesses. It does not help that the government has a 5% cap on work given to women and minority businesses.

I am hearing the cap will be raised but I am not sure if the hiring manager will get the message to the same time.

Several things we can do as women:

  • Before you open any business, do your homework.
  • When you want to be rewarded a government contract. Educated yourself and take offered training that is for free or low cost in many cases.
Communication, education, Inspiration, planning, tips

It is only how you look at things

Leave a comment

Finished up the mandatory CE for my licenses and I am so ready to leave the room. Not because I am done. NO I truly enjoined my time for additional information, education and networking. I am so ready to leave the negative crowd behind me who was part of the audience for the last few days.

I am constantly asking myself “when you don’t like to learn, why  are you calling yourself self-employed? They reminded me of a blog I had posted in March of last year called Are you a Real Estate Entrepreneur or Employee?  and an agent I have talked with who was not aware of the new changes within the field of real estate.

Some of the “old timers” and “new comers” into the field who tell me that nothing new can be taught to them. All this ran through my mind as I read a blog post Mark G. called “No Time for Improvement? Bah! Make Time for Improvement!”

What is the old saying: When you stop learning you need to move on or out of the business.


and anyone who tells me they don’t have time just keep in mind:

“Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” – H. Jackson Brown