Hilary Hill

Check out Nester's latest installment in her staging series: http://nestingplacenc.blogspot.com/2009/03/staging-your-home-for-sale-stepping.html

There are some great pictures to help you get some ideas and get started!

This picture is copied from The Nester's blog.

Lilly and I took our first GRI classes in August of this year. We started with the 200 series. Our classes were at the O'Henry in Greensboro August 18-21st. We'd love to hear from anyone else who was also in this class! This location was perfect for us because we live in the Gibsonville area so it was about a 20 minute drive to our class each morning. Plus the O'Henry is beautiful and surrounded by really good places to eat!

We have always loved any kind of classes or training but we have signed up for courses in the past that had a lot of information that wasn't immediately applicable to our business in real estate. So we were a little unsure of what to expect when we signed up for GRI. But, I am happy to report that we were pleasantly surprised! Not only was the information very applicable to daily business in real estate,but our four instructors were fantastic presenters as well. There wasn't a dull moment, our attention was kept focused all day each day - which, as you know, is hard to do when you have a bunch of restless Realtors in a room from 8-5 four days in a row!

The 200 series covered 1 - Residential Construction, 2 - Tax Planning for the Real Estate Professional, 3 - Legal Issues in Real Estate, and 4- Real Estate Trends. So we covered a wide range of great topics. We learned important information about the process home builders go through, what can or can't be written off on our taxes, how to potentially buy real estate using 401k money as a tool, what is most likely to get us in trouble (or sued!) and how to avoid it, what new innovative marketing and webtools to be looking out for and investigating, and so much more! It would be impossible to even touch on all of the great information in one short blog so we will probably blog about this again in more detail. But, we did want to encourage any agent who has thought about getting more education and really expanding their knowledge base. GRI is a great place to do just that while meeting some other successful Realtors and enjoying some really great instructors. We have already signed up to take the 300 series at Grandover in Greensboro in late January. We really feel strongly that this is a time and money investment that will make us better agents and better able to serve our clients and ourselves! We have a lot of respect for all of the agents out there who have their GRI designation and we look forward to joining those ranks as soon as we can!

Let me start by saying that I really hate to complain. Lilly and I generally try to be positive and have an open mind about new things. We usually take on a new challenge with excitment and the belief that we will quickly adapt and we will be better real estate agents and people for what the challenge has taught us. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case as we try to get used to the new Top Producer 8i.

I will admit that I like the new red background and how it has more graphics and a nice little Keller Williams Logo [contact us if you'd like info about joining KW (a little recruiting plug never hurts!)]. I also like the idea of the list of contacts automatically popping up to the right of the screen for easy access.

The problem that we are finding it it really isn't easy to access any information in the new version. There is an awful lot of clicking and scrolling that we just did not have to use in 7i. When we pull up a listing we now have to click on "Activities" and then click on "Service Activies and Showing" in order to input a showing or activity. This may not sound like a big deal but it takes twice as long and all of you agents out there know that it can be time consuming enough to record the activities going on with all of your listings. Adding an extra click in there really feels like a big deal when you have several showings to record. There are several other things that seem less user friendly such as adding notes and accessing the information from past notes. And, we still haven't figured out how to print a market service report in the new version. It really can be frustrating!

Ok, enough of our complaints. We would love to hear if anyone else has problems or, even better, if someone else really likes the new version. Hearing some good feedback on it might make Lilly and I less likely to fall back into our comfort zone and log into 7i instead of the fabulous new 8i.

I also got an email on this from Reg Gupton who suggested emailing Top Producer support with any positive or negative feedback. support@topproducer.com Maybe with all of our feedback they can tweak this new version and we will end up with somthing really great to help our businesses stay organized and growing!

Have a great day! Hilary & Lilly - The H Team