Martin Kalisker, WEICHERT, REALTORS®- Synergy: Metrowest's Preferred Realtor

In another example of "marketing ideas gone wrong", the Boston Globe recently carried a tidbit of information about a reader who wrote in with a story about how she took her daughter out to the local Dunkin Donuts one day and the daughter announced that she and her friends no longer liked to go to Dunkin Donuts. "Why" the mother asked. "Because the slogan 'America Runs on Dunkin' stands for A Rod (Alex Rodriquez of the NY Yankees - worse than poison to a member of Red Sox Nation)."

You've got to hand it to her. She has a point. As for the marketing geniuses at the Ad Agency. I think it's time to come up with a new slogan!!!

I am happy to announce that WEICHERT, REALTORS®-Synergy is once again supporting "Pie in the Sky" annual Thanksgiving Pie Sale to benefit Community Servings, based in Jamaica Plain, MA.

Community Servings is a not for profit organization that provides free, home delivered meals throughout eastern Massachusetts to 725 homebound individuals who are unable to shop or cook for themselves because they are too ill with acute life-threatening illnesses.

For every pie sold, Community Servings will be able to feed one of their clients lunch, dinner and a snack for a week.

Through the combined efforts of TEAM WEICHERT SYNERGY SELLS, we hope to sell 100 apple, pecan, pumpkin or sweet-potato pies to friends, family and neighbors in our primary service area of Wellesley, Natick, Dover, Weston, Wayland, Needham, Sherborn, Lexington and Newton, as well as to our friends and clients outside of the Metrowest area.

Pie sales are taking place now and will continue through Wednesday November 18, 2009. Orders may be placed by clicking here and selecting a pie for pick up or you may donate your pie back to Community Servings. Please choose site 129 for pickup at the WEICHERT, REALTORS®-Synergy offices during the afternoon of Tuesday, November 24 or all day Wednesday, November 25.

If you're not a pie lover, you can donate your pie to someone that Community Servings helps. This way, they too, can have a festive Thanksgiving.

For more information or to join Team Weichert Synergy Sells, go to Pie Seller Signup! and be sure to select Team Synergy Cares from the drop down list.

For more or contact Broker/Owner Martin Kalisker directly at 781-237-3102.

Dear Bo Didley -

Are you any relation to Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble, Elvis or John Doe? You see, all of these folks have registered for free home updates on my website www.synergy-metrowest.com.

It looks like you came back twice - once because registered with an invalid e-mail address (bo@didley.com), and the other with what I assume to be your actual e-mail so that you will receive the updates. You didn't give me a good telephone number either, because I called it today to thank you for registering for home updates and to see if I could assist you with an introduction to one of my Gold Services partners to get you pre-approved for a home loan.

Bo - one of the purposes of registering on our site is for us to be able to start a discussion about what property amenities you are looking for, your price range, your timing, etc. Without being able to contact you about this information, you are missing out on a whole bunch of neat things that we offer our clients and which differentiates us from Brand X down the street.

Without allowing us to communicate with you, you are missing out on the Synergy Difference.

So, in the meantime, I hope that you enjoy the features of my website and that you are able to wade through the MLS listings on your own. If there is anything that I can do to help make your property search easier, just give me a call or e-mail me. And don't forget to download your free "go mobile" application so that you can look up MLS listings as you drive by a neighborhood, or to help you with your search for open houses.

I hope to hear from you. I'm not disappointed by your wish to remain anonymous. I respect that. I just want you to know that I'm here for you when you are ready to work with a Realtor.

Kind Regards,

Martin E. Kalisker, ABR, E-Pro, LMC
Broker/Owner
WEICHERT, REALTORS®-Synergy
378 Washington Street
Wellesely Hills, MA 02481

martin@synergy-metrowest.com
www.synergy-metrowest.com

Have you ever thought about getting your real estate license? Are you currently licensed and haven't yet put your real estate skills to work? Are you ready for a career in real estate?

Come join us on Tuesday October 20 at 6:30 pm for our Career Seminar in Real Estate to learn more about career opportunities in real estate and with WEICHERT, REALTORS®-Synergy. Weichert is one of the fastest growing real estate franchises in the country and our office in Wellesley Hills continues to build market share. We have immediate opportunities for newly licensed as well as "seasoned" real estate agents. Systems, Tools and Training are included!

If you like to work with people and want a job with flexible hours and high visibility in the community, a career in real estate may just be for you! WEICHERT, REALTORS®-Synergy agents work with clients throughout the Metrowest, the North Shore and Greater Boston, in addition to our primary service area of Wellesley, Lexington, Natick, Newton, Needham, Dover, Sherborn, Wayland and Weston.

Interested? Call Broker Martin Kalisker at (781) 237-3102 to reserve a space.

WEICHERT, REALTORS®-Synergy
378 Washington Street
Wellesley Hills, MA 02481

Located off of Route 9 Westbound and Route 16 (Washington Street). Across from the Wellesley Hills Commuter Rail Station.

Is the short sale "bed too hard? Is it too soft? Why can't Realtors find a short sale that is "just right?"

I have always been amazed at how the real estate profession seems to be dominated by dinosaurs that refuse to evolve or let themselves become extinct. These folks seem to pass on some form of gene that has mutated even to the younger Gen Y agents who don't want to adapt to the current real estate climate, but rather, they want the current real estate climate to adapt to them.

Well, I for one am a chameleon. I can work through a tough market just as easily as I did in "easier" times when homes sold to the highest bidder and walk-in traffic to the office was non-stop each and every day.

So, I had to stand back and reflect a bit on the overload of blogs and comments on blogs about how awful it is to work with short sales and how lender A is the devil incarnate, and how the banks like to put the screws to Realtors over their commissions. It's all about me and nothing about the upside-down homeowner.

It's probably an understatement to say that banks and loan servicers were horribly unprepared for the housing market to collapse and for so many homeowners to default on their promissory notes. Lenders from all over the country got involved in the hysteria of granting home loans and equity lines on top of equity lines without taking a good look at common sense and risk-based lending practices. Many became geographically concentrated and many lenders are now out of business. Those lenders that survived were forced to pick up the pieces and try to salvage what they could from the rubble. The real estate industry, for the most part, has not been there to help, but instead has sat there like a vulture waiting for the next lender to collapse from the weight of all those broken pieces.

That's right, we as an industry have not tried to help the banks to pick up the pieces. We've only fought with them to make their lives more difficult. Instead of working with them to come up with better service models and best practices, we have individually criticized the entire mortgage industry for not doing enough.

On our side, we took the hungriest Realtors and made them "short sale specialists." The primadonna Realtors wouldn't dare dirty their hands with short sales, but instead chose to save their energy to be the loudest complainers about the system. The problem with taking the hungriest Realtors to do short sales is that as a group, they oversold themselves and instead of using their heads, they used their greed to build up mini 'empires" to preclude those of us who have developed through evolution into full-service loss mitigation specialists that have a solid "core" of legal, accounting, and mortgage lending professionals at our disposal, as well as exercising solid business acumen.

The short sale process got messy because we let the banks and services develop their own individual policies and procedures to solve their problems. In fact, most short sales with a single lender are successful, once the policies and procedures of the lender are adhered to by the Realtor. When the policies and procedures of multiple lenders conflict with one and the other, the short sale process becomes quite nightmarish. Instead of the NAR taking the time to address the short sale crisis with the banking and mortgage loan industry, we fought with the banks - often times to the detriment of our mutual client - the distressed homeowner.

In February, the US Treasury announced the Making Home Affordable (MHA) program, which promised to modify the way that lenders review and approve short sale transactions. (See my blog "Renavigating the Short Sale Waters - What You Should Know About MHA"). The new guidelines for approving short sale transactions under MHA are a positive step towards streamlining the approval process, the acceptable sales price and Realtor commissions. As of the end of September, 67 national loan servicers and lending institutions had registered with the Treasury to adopt the new MHA guidelines.

So, what have we as an industry done? Very little. However, the "little bears" of our industry have all started to run around with a rallying cry of "destroy the MHA guidelines, they won't help us sell the homes that we have listed." A non-Realtor friend of mine recently commented that we sound like a bunch of spoiled babies. We weren't consulted by the government, therefore, we don't want to play by their new rules.

But wait a minute. Weren't these same Realtors the ones that let the banks set up their own way of approving short sales and allowed their clients to make multiple offers on short sale properties, hoping that something would "stick"? Weren't these the same Realtors that had nothing good to say about Bank A, B and C because their short sale processes took too long? Weren't these the same Realtors that regularly complained that they wasted all their time and effort trying to get a home sold before the lender foreclosed on the property?

Sorry to tell you all. You can't have it both ways. I don't see too many lenders or servicers complaining about the new guidelines. I haven't seen any rational discussion from a servicer why they haven'tsigned on to the MHA program.

Is this just another example of the dinosaurs refusing to evolve? Or is it even more basic than that. Are we the Goldilocks of the industry? Do we have trouble finding a bed that is just right, because we are too busy finding those beds that are too soft or too hard?