Ben's Short Sale Insights

 Have you ever gotten a letter mailed to you in a popcorn bag? It happened to me the other day. It was from a commercial loan company, and they had made the envelope look like a real Popcorn Bag. Of course I opened the envelope and read the letter. I have seen many unique envelopes in my time, bu...

Question from agent: "We have American Home Mortgage, loan processor for a Mortgage held by Deutche Bank, add a 1% 'processing fee' that ONLY the buyer can pay to be acceptable to the mortgage insurance issuer. This was never revealed until the purchase approval letter arrived. The buyer is upset...

 Who else wants to turn a lemon into lemonade? This down market is affecting all of our businesses. But, we can either fight it and lose business, or embrace the changes in the business and prosper. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should start thinking negative on the market, but rathe...

 I thought of a good example yesterday of the difference between “selling in print” and the traditional marketing that most people do. By most people I mean what is taught in colleges and universities, big corporations, and the typical advertising agency. The biggest mistake that most of these pe...

 If I was a miner that is what I would say about expired listings. If you have expireds in your market and you aren’t attempting to list them, then you are missing out on one of the richest veins of gold around. Expireds are great because they are the most realistic, reasonable sellers.  To get a...

I get a lot of questions about my system sometimes. Questions such as, "Is this the “Magic Pill” that is going to instantly change my real estate business and life for the better?" Below I answer some of those questions. But, before I go into those, I wanted to ask you a question. What is your bi...

I get a lot of questions about my system sometimes. Questions such as, "Is this the “Magic Pill” that is going to instantly change my real estate business and life for the better?" Below I answer some of those questions.   But, before I go into those, I wanted to ask you a question. What is your...

 The tale of two builders. There is a builder in our town that built 80 to 100 homes a year during the boom. He has an excellent reputation for high end custom homes, and a lot of his employees thought that the slowdown wouldn’t affect them. Well, it has. He will probably build 10 homes in 2008. ...

 Let me talk about a very important time management strategy today. It is what I call “blocking time.” That is when you set aside a certain amount of time every single day to do certain things. For example, I break up my day between generating business; closings, preparing for appointments, and a...

 Listing expireds is a process. We do the following for the best return with the least amount of time. First we mail the expired letter on day number one. If the home is near our office or drive to and from work we will stop by and knock on the door. The follow up letters go out one per week for ...