Rod Moser

In every field there are key results areas (sometimes referred to as fundamentals), that if mastered, will lead you to success.

In the field of basketball it would be, for example: Ball Handling, Passing, Shooting, Basketball intelligence (game management), and Teamwork. When mastered you go from average to good to great.

In real estate sales, I believe that these are the key results areas. If we can improve in each of these areas we will see our business boom!

1. Prospecting
2. Building Rapport
3. Needs Analysis
   
4. Needs Solutions (including pricing, staging, and marketing)
5. Handling Objections
6. Closing
7. Servicing (Including weekly updates, scheduling showings, feedback, flyers, etc.)
8. Contract Negotiations
9. Getting Referrals

The challenge that many of us face is that we don't balance our key results areas. We may, for example, spend all of our time looking for new clients but if we don't service the accounts we have we are sabotaging our business. We may be constantly striving to improve the way we market our properties but if we don't continue to prospect we won't have clients to serve.

The key to mastering the field of real estate is by continually improving and touching each of the key results areas.

What a good friend of mine recommended was to give myself a grade (1-10) in each of these areas today. Find out where the weakest link is and improve it. He said that I would only be as good as my weakest key results area. By focusing on improving the areas I was weakest in, I would be improving my entire real estate career.

Well, that makes sense to me so I am going to start. If any of you feel that I am missing anything or have some suggestions in any of these areas, I would love to hear them.

If you would like to send me a personal message you can reach me through my website www.rbmhomes.com

Thanks in advance for sharing your ideas!

Curly, in the movie 'City Slickers' said that the secret of life was "one thing". If you could figure out what that one thing was, you would be happy.

I have read several books by people like Tom Hopkins, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Gary Keller, and others who have become masters in our field. Years ago Napoleon Hill interviewed the most successful people in the world and wrote 8 books about what these masters knew that helped them become so successful.

After reading the secrets of the masters in our field, one thing continues to come up again and again. It is the underlying secret that lies within the pages of each one of these masters success stories and it just happens to also be in the stories of Napoleon Hill's masters as well.

The secret of success in real estate and in life is.....

Do the most important thing possible at every given moment.

The challenge that everyone faces is knowing what the most important thing is at each given moment. Obviously there are several people who have written books on how to know what the most important thing is to you. My favorites are 'Goals' by Brian Tracy and 'The 7 Habits...' by Steven Covey, and 'Awaken the Giant Within' by Tony Robbins. The key is in identifying your values and setting goals that are consistent with your values.

I have been doing an exercise that Brian Tracy suggests in his book. Writing down your top 10 goals every day for a year without referring to your prior day's list. According to Brian, you will be amazed at how your list might change slightly from day to day until it becomes consistent. These final consistent goals will reflect the things that are most important to you. He also suggests that a majority of these goals will be met. By focusing on them every day they will eventually become a consistent focus in your life, both consciously and subconsciously and you will find ways to acheive your goals because of the attention you pay to them.

By setting goals and striving to reach your goals your life will have a clear direction and a clear focus. This is what will truly make you happy. I am here to tell you that this is the one thing that seperates the great ones from the mediocre. It seperates those individuals who have found true happiness and those who are depressed or just surviving.

If you want to give your business the boost that will put you over the top, that will make you one of the top 10% in your field, that will make you a success in both your career and your personal life, begin to set goals consistent with your beliefs and values.

I'm sure there are stories out there and I would love to have them as comments on the blog. Please share your successes and let's inspire others in our field!

So as we are out recruiting new agents, the question arises, how can you tell the good ones from the great ones? Which ones are going to be fantastic and which ones are going to fizzle?

While I haven't been able to find a good measuring stick for desire, I have found a suitable substitute. It is commitment! I was recently reading a wonderful book called 'The Art of Strategy' by Dixit & Nalebuff where they discussed strategies for success.

They discussed strategies that worked for Hernan Cortez in his conquests in South America and the Athenian General Xenophon. Cortez sank his ships so his army had no way to get back to Spain. It was conquer or die. Xenophon fought with his back up against an impassible ravine after destroying the bridge that could carry them to safety. The only options they had was to win or die. With no other options, they fought like lions and won!

There are so many new agents that want to try selling houses for a living. They hold onto their lifeline of another job or a safe out. They never fully commit to their new career. You may not be able to measure desire but those agents who commit to succeeding in real estate and cut off all other options are much more likely to succeed than those who are 'testing the waters'.

Get your agents to commit and cut off all other options and you will see success!!

After processing a few pre-foreclosure sales, I have been surprised at the bidding strategies employed by those hoping to win the chance to buy these homes.

In order to best understand the strategy to employ we need to understand how the auction (or bid) works. The pre-foreclosure bidding process is essentially a sealed bid auction.

In a sealed bid auction:

• Each bidder submits their bid for an item.
• Their bids are hidden from the others.
• The highest bid wins the opportunity to purchase the auctioned item for the amount of their bid.

Let's consider some characteristics of the pre-foreclosure sale.

• Each person has the opportunity to inspect the property before placing a bid.
• Each bidder can have the help of an agent who can pull comparable sales and help determine a fair market value for the property.
• Each of the bids is hidden from the other bidders.
• The highest bid wins the opportunity to purchase the auctioned item for the amount of their bid (as long as the bid meets the 'reserve' requirement of the bank.)

This is a stark contrast from the purchase of a foreclosure on the courthouse steps. The buyer does not have the opportunity to inspect the property. They are buying the home 'as-is' without the ability to have an interior inspection of the home. It requires a completely different strategy (which would be a great topic for a future blog).

But....since we are dissecting the strategy of the pre-foreclosure sale, I will try to stay on topic.

The question is, what should you bid for the property? Well, what you should bid is an extremely simple process. It only requires you to consider 2 things.

1. What is the cost you attribute to the time it will take for the bank to make a decision on the pre-foreclosure sale?
2. What is your valuation of the property?
3. Most important, because it is a sealed auction bid, you can't take into consideration what the other bids are.

To come up with your bid, all you need to do is take your valuation and subtract from that, the cost you attribute to waiting. Voila, you have your bid!

Here is the reasoning. Because you have no information about what others are bidding, you can't take this into consideration. Suppose you feel the home is worth $275,000 and you feel that the cost you attribute to waiting for the bank to make a decision is 10%. You should bid $257,500. ($275,000 - 27,500) If you win the bid at $257,500 then you will have made a great purchase and been compensated for waiting.

Since there is no way to know what others have bid, (this is a sealed auction bid) you should just decide what the property value is to you and make that your bid. If you bid your value then you can't lose. If someone bids more than you do then they obviously placed a higher value on the property and you wouldn't feel bad because you wouldn't have wanted to pay that price to buy the home. If you win, then it doesn't matter what the others' bid because you paid what you felt the home was worth to you minus the cost of waiting. You made a good purchase.

It does you no good to worry or wonder what the other bids are. Because you can't know, you shouldn't take that into consideration (have I covered this enough?). Do your due diligence prior to placing your bid and then sit back and relax. I can't tell you how upset I have seen people get when they are outbid on a home. Well, you wouldn't be upset if you bid your true value. The only way you lose in a pre-foreclosure auction is by bidding less than your valuation of the property.

I hope this helps, good luck on your next pre-foreclosure bid

So I couldn't sleep tonight because I have been thinking about 2 listing appointments I had earlier today with families who are selling 'by owner'. In both cases, I believe that the families are planning on marketing their homes with me. One of the families needs to get their home ready to market by staging the home and doing some touch ups. They plan on doing the paperwork to begin the marketing process on the 23rd of Feb (this shouldn't take 10 days but they are leaving town for a week). The other family needed the weekend to consider everything (obviously the brokerage fee) because I committed the sin of only having 1 of the 2 decision makers present during most of the presentation. The husband finally made it home after I had toured the home and made it through a majority of the presentation. If you have never done this, it is nearly impossible to catch the missing spouse up with the same buildup intensity as the original presentation. The simplified version of my presentation didn't have the same impact.

What is keeping me up tonight is the fact that both families are losing money. I wanted to find a way to quantify exactly how much each family is losing. It is late and I don't know if this will make sense but play along and see if you agree.

Assuming that there is a mortgage on the home, can't we agree that any interest paid on a home you are selling is money lost at this point? First, it doesn't go to principal. Next, you can't increase the price of your home by the amount of interest lost every month. It wouldn't be wise to start out at $150,000, for example, and increase your asking price by $750 each month to compensate for the money lost. In fact, the longer the house is on the market, the more pressure to lower your price, right? Now you may say that you would be paying interest on another home but any interest paid in a home you are planning on staying in is 1 more month off of the original term of the mortgage. You are closer to owning your home and have a finite number of payments. Interest paid on a home you are trying to sell is a complete loss because after the sale you are going to start over with another amortized mortgage from the very first payment. Agreed? Good.

Next we must consider our current market. I am being very cautious in my estimation that the Cache Valley real estate market is declining at a modest 3% per year right now. Some markets are sliding at a much faster rate. Nationwide the numbers are closer to 20% according to the Case-Shiller Index.

OK, so let's try to put the numbers together to see how much each of these families is losing per day.

Family #1:

Estimated market value = $245,000; Mortgage $160,000; Interest 6.5%; Estimated decrease in market value 3%/yr.

Interest cost is $160,000 * 6.5% / 360 = $28.89 per day

Depreciation cost = $245,000 * .03 / 360 = $20.42 per day

Each day that family #1 delays the sale of there home costs them about $49.31 By Monday they will have lost $147.92 Each month they will lose $1,479.30 that they will not recover.

Family #2:

Estimated market value $180,000; Mortgage $150,000; Interest 6.5%; Estimated decrease in market value 3%/yr

Interest cost is $150,000 * 6.5% / 360 = $27.08 per day

Depreciation cost = $180,000 * .03 / 360 = $15 per day

Each day that family #2 delays the sale of there home costs them about $42.08. By the 23rd they will have lost $$420.80. Each month they will lose $1,262.40 that they will not recover.

Now I realize that this is a simplified version of a complex equation. Sure, I didn't take into consideration that the interest cost should shrink based on principal reduction, etc. It doesn't matter. These numbers are going to be pretty close to accurate.

The longer a person delays in this market, the more they are going to lose. How critical is it to price a home right from the beginning? So much to consider. Well, now that this is on paper, maybe I can get some sleep.