About Knoxville's Fox Run

Use Realty Executives Associates exclusive 10K marketing program.

One of the innovative and exclusive benefits to marketing your Knoxville area home with me and Realty Executives Associates is our exclusive 10K program.

It works like this: Each listing that is designated as a 10K home offers the selling agent for that home a 1 in 45 chance to win a $10,000 cash prize. That incentive gets Realtors from not only Realty Executives but others companies as well, excited about showing and selling your home.

This beautiful home in Farragut, Tennessee is a Realty Executives Associates 10K listing and a "Featured Home" on www.KnoxvilleHomeCenter.com

As part of my fee I include the $250.00 10K entry fee for your home.

Once 45 10K designated homes have been sold, Realty Executives hosts a luncheon, all 45 selling agents drop their business card into a bowl, they are drawn out in reverse order, and the last one drawn wins a $10,000 cash prize!

So far now we have held 42 10K luncheons and given away $420,000 in cash prizes to 42 luck Knoxville area Realtors.

Recently our 42nd 10K luncheon was held and Frances Crawford of Town and Country Realtors of East Tennessee was the lucky $10,000 winner.

Do you think Frances might have been a happy camper after enjoying a delicious lunch with 44 of her fellow Realtors at Cherokee Country Club and then walking out with a check for $10,000.00?

This spectacular cedar sided home in a country setting is surrounded by 11 acres of level land and is a "Featured Home" at www.KnoxvilleHomeCenter.com.

Thinking of selling your Knoxville home in today’s market? If so you need not only aggressive pricing and a “move in” condition home, you also need every marketing tool available to promote the sale.

Visit www.KnoxvilleHomeCenter.com for lots of FREE tips on how to prepare your home to sell faster in today's market.

Credit Suisse is "a world-leading financial services company, advising clients in all aspects of finance, around the world, around the clock."

They also have been conducting their own monthly surveys of real estate agents in the US because they believe that "agents will provide an accurate assessment of housing market trandes in both the new and existing home markets."

Each month I get a survey asking 5 main questions which they then compile the answers with others all over the US and calculate an index for the answers. 50 is their median with numbers above 50 being a positive or improving trend and below being negative.

The questions are:

1. Are traffic levels in line with, above, or below your expectations for this time of year?
2. Have prices remained the same, increased, or decresed over the past 30 days?
3. Have incentives remained the same, increased, or decreased over the past 30 days?
4. Do you see the same, more, or fewer listings as compared with 30 days ago?
5. Does it take the same, more, or less time to sell a house?

Here are some selected results (it's a long list of cities & data) with comments from area agents.

Atlanta, Georgia: Traffic slows as buyers feel bottom is still a ways off; home prices slice.Atlanta is the 3rd largest homebuilding market in the country.

Comments from Atlanta real estate agents:

• "Most buyer prospects are first time buyers. They have not suffered equity losses and are more forward looking. buyers of second or third time purchase are more relectant to make a buying decision."
• "Buyers are mainly going for low priced foreclosures."

Charlotte, North Carolina: Traffic deteriorates reflecting continued fallout in the financial services sector. Charlotte is the 9th largest market in the country.

Buyer traffic deteriorates as unemployment creeps higher. Buyer traffic levels fell in February, again coming in below agents' expecations, with buyer traffic index decreasing to 19 in February compated to 23 in January.

Comments from Charlotte real estate agents:

• "There remains a big disconnect between buyers and sellers. Sellers are not willing to sell at lower prices and buyers are not willing to buy at sellers current prices. Every buyer wants the deal of a century and sellers are simply not willing to sell at that price level."
• "There have been an incrase in first time homebuyer traffic, but most are cautious because of worries over job security."

Dallas, Texas: Tough economy, lending requirements, pressure traffic, and prices.

Traffic slips as employment fears outweigh improved affordability. Our traffic index posted a modest decline in February, falling fto 36 from 43 in January, incidcating worsening traffic levels over the past 30 days and gain at levels below agents' expectations.

Comments from Dallas, Texas real estate agents:

• "People are taking their houses off the market and are afraid to buy new houses with larger mortgages."
• "Low interst rates are perking buyer interest"

And the other comments and numbers are pretty much the same from the other cities. Lack of consumer confidence in the economy, fear of unemployment, and a lack of confidence in the massive federal bailout plan along with tighter lending standards all combine to continue to drive housing prices lower in most area and stall sales.

I think graphs and charts are great to explain and demonstrate things in a colorful, easy to understand fashion.

One way I use graphs in my business is to show my sellers how I track their home's online activity and keep a running total of how many people have viewed it.

Visual Tour.com offers a great graph with page views of each virtual tour.

The Visual Tour folks give you several options to automatically syndiate your listings.

KnoxvilleHomeCenter.com is my personal website and each of my listings is a "Featured Home" there.

kaarmls.com is my Association public idx website.

Realtor.com is NAR's official website

FrontDoor.com is HGTV's online real estate site

"Other" can include: Google Base, Homes.com, The Real Estate Book, Yahoo Real Estate, Zillow.com, HomeSeekers.com, Trulia, HomePages.com, Prudential Properties VOW, and Vast.com.

Below is the weekly viewer breakdown for one of my listings on Realtor.com.

This chart demonstrates that over 1600 people have viewed this listing on Realtor.com during the past 3 months or so.

Below is the number of real estate transfers recorded in the Knox County TN Register of Deeds office during a 1 week period broken down by price ranges.

This is our days on market summary for the past 9 years.

You'll notice our average days on market hasn't changed significantly over the past 9 years. I found that fact interesting. Virtually same time to sell in both good market and not so good.

I also get data from other sources. A statistical service called The market edge furnishes this information on residential building permits in Knox County Tennessee

Graphs and charts do great job of telling a story to buyers and sellers in a way that instantly easy to understand rather than just throwing raw numbers at them.

While reading a reading a recent issue of Greg Swann's BloodHound Blog I noticed an article about custom yard sign, each designed especially for a specific property.

For want of a better name I call them single property yard signs. Sounded like a pretty cool idea to me so I started doing some research as to how I could create my own.

Greg is somewhat of a perfectionist along with being an innovator. After reading the process Greg goes through to turn out one sign I decided to look for a qucker and easier way.

Fortunately in Knoxville we have a great printing company called Print Edge who can print basically anything on most anything.

I did a sample of what I thought I wanted in Microsoft Publisher, printed several versions out on 8 1/2 X 11 paper, saved a high resolution version on a thumb drive and went to visit Print Edge to see what they could do for me.

It turned out to be remarkably simple. Tom Qualkenbush, one of the Print Edge customer service guys took at look at my samples and said they could easily print them on 4 millimeter Coroplast, which is sort of like a corrugated box only plastic, for about 20 bucks each, full color on 2 sides and with waterproof and UV resistant ink so they won't fade in sunlight.That's in the pretty standard 24 X 18 size which the majority of yard signs all over are.

Below is what my first effort looks like; it's working for me right now in the front yard of one of my listings.

As I said this is the first effort. I already intend to make some changes for the next sign. First I didn't use a high enough resolution on the photos so they look very slightly pixilated so I'll double the resolution and Tom said that should cure that.

I didn't have a good company logo, Tom says they have them and he can drop one in to replace the company name. Tennessee real estate law requires the agent's name to be the same size as the company name and phone number and to appear on all advertising so we're good to go on that.

Here's another example from Mariana Wagner in Colorado

Single property yard signs, cost effective, and another easy way to make your listing stand out from the others and you to stand out from the other Realtors in your area.