Anna Ray

Here in Boise seller's have asked me why they should update their home. "What difference will it make in the final sell price?" they ask. I tell them "Investors flip houses for a reason." Doesn't it make sense that if people can actually make a living selling an updated house that you should sell your home for tons more money if you take a little time to update it?

Of course it does! I would personally rather take out a 3 or 4 thousand dollar credit card loan and pay the interest on that loan while it sits on the market than I would sell my home with out current updates. Did you know that a home will sell anywhere from 10% to 40% more if you update it? Of course, that depends on what you do and the neighborhood it is in.

Seller's please do not EVER sell your home with out updating it.

Anna Ray

208 989 9223

Anna.Ray@Century21.com

Century21, 1st place Realty

Time managment is the only way to stay afloat in this business. Start out small, so you don't get time managment overload. Move up as you grow. You have to want to manage your time or this will never work for you.

Start here:

1. The to-do list:

Write out a list of your top priorities for the day. Start with three, then move it up to five. To-Do Lists should be prioritized lists of all the tasks that you need to carry out that day. They list everything that you have to do, with the most important tasks at the top of the list, and the least important tasks at the bottom. Motivating yourself is to keep your list relatively short and to keep it in front of you at all times throughout the day. Aim to complete it every day. Here's an example:

1. Call Joan Smith about listing her house.

2. Call Jim about an investment property.

3. Call those three fsbo's in my area.

2. Accountability

Find 2 agents in your office to meet with weekly and discuss progress, if you have your daily goals set then you will find that monthly and yearly goals are attainable. One agent will not be enough to hold you accountable. We all need accountability.

3. Just say "no"

Saying "yes" to every person that wants and needs something from you is not going to make time management better. Or make you an inherently better agent - it will, instead, set you up to be in your own personal ceaseless losing battle to do your best at every task you agree to take on, so get rid of those go-nowhere leaches.

4. Multi-task

It is difficult to do multiple things at once, but think how much more you could accomplish! Simply find other ways to do two or more things at once. For example, update your website as you return calls, answer emails while you are waiting for documents or files to download, and clean blog as you chat with sellers.

So, say you have a buyer come through one of your listings once or twice. They seem generally interested. In this kind of market it is legal for seller's to make a buyer an offer. Why not give it a try???? Get the ball rolling. Give them your bottom line!

Here are some interesting short sale facts.

1. By definition a short sale is any sale by an owner that provides a pay-off to its mortgage company that is less than what the full obligation of principal, interest and fees would normally be.

2. President Bush past a law on December 20th, 2007 allowing Bill H.R. 3648 to come into practice that allowed mortgage companies to agree to accept less on the principal balanced owed.

3. They are called short sales because they "short" the bank the money owed on the principal balance.

4. The average short sale takes 90 days to get approved.

5. The bill H.R. 3648 will only allow short sales through 2009.

6. If a short sale packet is presented to a mitigation officer missing any peice of the short sale packet it will get thrown to the bottom of the pile and take longer to get approved.

7. A seller participating in a short sale, can make offers on property while they are in the short sale process (I have no idea how they get approved for the loans exactly, maybe if they have cash....generally it takes a couple years at minimum to restore a seller's credit)

8. The debt relief is not taxable like most debt relief.

So, I have been at this about a year now. I have wanted to be an agent since I was a little girl. My family knew that I would either grow up to be either a doctor or a realtor. When I first started I decided to start a farm. I went to 700 doors and knocked. Then started sending letters. I haven't had much luck with that. I recently joined a team. That has helped me to generate more leads that I pulled off on my own. My first sale came from my team.

I can't count the number of hand written letters I have written to people in default on their mortgage. Not always hand-written, though. I am neck and neck with the amount of money I have put into this thing and the amount that I have returned. I have probably made a little more, but not much. I have tried the lead generation system that costs big bucks. Now I have started Blogging. I hope this is just the market and not that I'm not cut out to be an agent. I'm now trying to find investors. They buy even while the market is slow. I think they are the way to go at this point in order to stay afloat.