Jolenta Averill, MBA

Ah, this is the life! Lake living at its best. Waterskiing, boating, fishing, birdwatching, or just relaxing on the pier with a cold one, your feet dangling into the cool lake water. The possibilities for entertainment and relaxation are endless!

At Lake & City Homes Realty, we're proud to announce a bevy of new tools for quickly locating a variety of lakefront property in Madison WI, Dane County, and throughout South Central Wisconsin. There are eight new tools in total that have been developed which will be unveiled, as time permits, over the course of the next few weeks. All eight tools are located on the homepage of our flagship website about Madison WI real estate.

The first tool is for quickly displaying the latest listings and price changes for all Madison area lakefront property. Simply click on the link marked Lake|River Frontage and you can instantly view all the updated property listings with actual lake frontage in our area sorted by price range. There's no better way to quickly get a gist for the available inventory of Madison WI lakefront and riverfront homes than with our easy-to-use, one-click search snippet. There's even a built-in social bookmarking tool right there on the page so you can save the lakefront homes page to your favorite aggregator or share it with your contacts!

Register on LakeAndCityHomes.com and you can do so much more! Define your own searches, save your searches to Favorites, receive property alerts by email and much, much more!

If you have cients moving to the Madison area who are interested in touring some of the beautiful lakefront homes available on Madison's fine four lakes, please contact me or call 608.230.5553 and ask for broker/owner Jolenta Averill. As an independent broker, Lake & City Homes Realty pays a very competitive 30% referral fee for all referrals. What's more, we guarantee top-notch service to ensure both maximum future referral potential as well as to avoid expensive, wasteful, direct mail marketing. We care about our cilents as well as about our environment!

Think your pipeline is empty? Feeling discouraged about the dreary housing market? Think buyers are scarcer than snow in July?

Guess again, my friends. Your pipeline is full. In fact it is so chock full of buyers (and sellers) right now you have no idea how much you can grow your business!

How am I so sure about this? Let me explain.

Over the past five years I added approximately $12.5m in sales to my bottom line by using a very simple technique that was so successful it has resulted in my cutting ties with my broker at the start of 2009 and launching my own real estate company.

Here's how I did it:

1. My first client was a guy I met in a park (my then 4 year-old struck up a conversation with his daughter) (two transactions totaling $363K)
2. I sold a house to the cashier at Ace Hardware ($302K)
3. I sold a house to the salesgirl at Pottery Barn ($430K)
4. I sold a house to the part-timer working at my son's after-school program ($195K)
5. I sold a house to the photographer who took the photo for my business card ($145K)
6. I sold a house to a guy I met at my son's after school program ($179,900)
7. I sold a house to the guy who installed the siding on my house (he bought two properties!) ($600K)
8. I sold a house to a guy I met in Paris 20 years prior for not more than 10 seconds and never saw again until he moved from MN to WI ($415K)
9. I listed the parents' house of a girl who had played with my older siblings 30+ years ago when I was growing up, who lived out of state, and whom I had never met until she was referred to me by a neighbor ($257K)
10. I listed a flat-fee MLS listing that I had showed (the owner's Mom and my Mom were friends years ago) and several more listings and sales of unrelated properties over a period of two years (total $2.3m)
11. My biggest client turned out to be a guy my then 5 year-old met as a result of petting his dog while waiting in line for an ice cream cone (multiple transactions & referrals for Madison real estate over nearly five years totaling $7.12m)

What is the point here? It's that absolutely none of the above business came from my broker whatsoever (in fact, in five years I can count on one hand the number of referrals I got from my broker) and none of it came from direct marketing (in fact I have never done a direct mailing piece in my entire real estate career). All of it came from talking to people and handing out my business card (although most of the time I didn't even offer it unless they asked for it).

So the point is that if you think you don't have any good prospects, my friends, think again! All of the above business came completely naturally as a result of simply interacting with people who came into my life in very normal, mundane ways. As a result of all this extra business I've been in the top few percent of all Realtors in the South Central WI MLS every year for the past five years!

I currently have listed a very cute East Side bungalow belonging to my massage therapist ($150K) and am working on my AT&T customer service rep, three tellers at my bank, an old high school acquaintance, the receptionist at a local title company, and my sign designer! I'd probably have a lot more going on right now but I stopped talking to people for about two months while I was busy working on my new Madison real estate website!

So in these challenging times, folks, stay positive, believe in the value of your services, and don't underestimate how many people you already come into contact with on a regular basis who WILL turn into paying clients if you keep engaging them in an interested, genuine way!

In fact, whether you are feeling discouraged or not, whether you feel your pipeline is full or not, whether or not you're excited about the 2009 housing market, I challenge every single person reading this blog post to go out and ask every single person that you come into contact with on a regular basis for their business. And keep doing it, even if they're not interested at first. Then report back here how your business has grown.

It might take awhile, so go ahead and bookmark this page so you can find it when you're ready to report back later!

I also welcome hearing from anyone who has already bought or listed a property on behalf of someone they met just going about their daily business like the examples I've shown above.

Thanks in advance everybody - I look forward to reading your success stories!

Jolenta

P.S. Guess what I found when I was helping my seller stage his house the other day? A fridge magnet from the agent who sold him the house!! That is the power of talking to people, folks (I've been talking to this seller on and off about his house for the last two years) rather than relying on marketing gimmicks.

It's a well-known fact that most buyers have little imagination. Unless they see a home set up pretty much exactly the way they want it set up, they often have trouble imagining what a house would look like if it was arranged differently. That's why I'm a big believer in staging. I've been known to go to great lengths to stage a vacant listing, even using excess furniture from one listing to stage another listing! And I'm a big believer that in these challenging economic times, agents need to master the basics when it comes to staging their listings.

Sure there are a lot of expensive courses you can take to become a certified staging expert. I've even taken some of them. Or you can hire someone to stage your listing and cost your sellers (or yourself) a lot of time and money. There's no question a well-staged home (that's priced right) will attract a great deal more attention from prospective buyers, whereas an unstaged home (despite the fact that it may be well-priced) will more often than not sit on the market for an extended period of time.

With a little time, energy, creativity (and cooperation from your sellers!), however, you'll be surprised how well you can stage your own listings for little to no time and money.

Here are the basic principles I used to stage a new listing I'm putting on the market on Madison Wisconsin's East Side this week:

• remove clutter from surfaces and replace with items (e.g. candles) that can be displayed in "twos & threes"
• don't mix vastly different styles of furniture in the same room (Victorian + Modern Contemporary = Ouch!)
• remove rugs that are sitting on top of carpeting (it might give the impression you're hiding a stain)
• avoid clashing patterns when it comes to bed linens, throw pillows & blankets on couches, etc.
• give each room one purpose (e.g. don't combine office equipment and bedroom furniture)
• create "white space" in bookshelves, on side tables, on kitchen countertops, etc.
• relocate any lamp that's sitting directly in front of a window
• put fresh fruit or flowers in the kitchen and set the table
• size artwork and pictures to the available wall space
• open up spaces by removing or relocating furniture
• if possible, create a focal point for each room
• avoid putting too many pictures in hallways
• avoid displaying too many items on shelves
• make sure outdoor furniture is left outside
• avoid displaying personal items & photos
• when possible, center furniture on walls

In three hours I was able to whip my new listing into shape (thanks to a very cooperative seller!). Here are a few "before and after" pictures I shot (I would have a lot more pictures to show you but I didn't think of writing this post until we were three-quarters of the way finished!).

Here's my before and after shot of the Master bedroom:

See how ghetto the first shot is?! My seller and I really laughed our heads off at these photos. Thank goodness he was so good-natured about it!

My seller and I achieved this effect simply by removing clashing patterns and pillows from the bed, relocating the office equipment and office furniture that was in the Master bedroom, moving a set of drawers to the other side of the room, removing outdated blinds from the patio doors and hanging sheers, setting up a small bedside table at the front of the bed, folding a blanket and placing it at the bottom of the bed, and placing a small number of decorative items on the remaining furniture. As a result, the seller (who had since stopped sleeping in the bedroom, opting for the living room couch instead), decided the bedroom looked considerably more inviting and decided to start sleeping in the Master bedroom again. Hopefully he'll even be getting better sleep now! I wish I'd gotten a before shot of the office furniture that was in the bedroom where the chest of drawers is now located- it really looked out of place! (See the photo at the end of this article for how the office looks now that it's relocated to a spare room that was just perfect for an office or den.)

Here's my rather dramatic before and after photo of the deck:

Here, it was simply a case of straightening the wrought-iron deck chairs (also taking one outside that was being used indoors) and opening up the umbrella. The snow was frozen solid so we couldn't do anything about that. Within less than 2 minutes we had a far more hospitable-looking deck!

Voila! The new office has been relocated from the Master bedroom to a spare room just steps away on the same floor of the house. How perfect does this look?!

For this staging exercise I spent no money and neither did my seller. Just a little time, creativity and teamwork got the job done (in three hours we staged the whole house). Most importantly, we got the job done before going on the market. There's simply no point putting a home on the market that you know isn't quite ready for prime-time (at least not in a buyer's market). Spend the time upfront to get the property in question in tip-top showing condition, even if you have to roll up your sleeves and pitch in yourself. You'll save yourself and your seller many hours of frustration resulting from negative or less than enthusiastic feedback. You'll also be able to market your properties with more confidence because you'll be secure in the knowledge you did everything within reason to get it looking its best.

For more pictures and information about this listing please visit my featured Madison WI listings located on the homepage of LakeAndCityHomes.com or call Jolenta Averill at Lake & City Homes Realty at (608) 230.5553.