Rain City Guide

Here’s a humorous story that came through my inbox. I usually have very low expectations for forwarded jokes and other crap people send me, but the punchline on this one had me roaring, and literally, laughing out loud.
A city councilman, Mark Easton, lives in a Utah neighborhood. He had a beautiful view of the east [...]

At a client conference in my last job, one of the keynote speakers was writer James Surowiecki, author of the book The Wisdom of Crowds. Pulling notes from his book, he made a compelling case that large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant; better at fostering innovation, [...]

As a follow up to Ardell’s post about finding those homes where the owners just didn’t take the time, or have the money/energy to bring the home to retail condition, I’d like to share a few before and after photos. These two sets of photo are from light fixers my wife and I rehabbed last [...]

I’ve heard a rumor, and I can’t figure out how to verify this using custom searches on Locator, but is it true that 20% of residential properties don’t appear on the MLS feeds to the Redfins and Homevalues of the world (as well as Windermere, John L. Scott, etc.). I was told that a good [...]

Within the segment of consumers who want to be homeowners, there’s a subset who cannot qualify for a loan, and will therefore not be a homeowner until they can. Typically, these folks have a credit profile that precludes them from qualifying for a loan that can work within the parameters of their income and [...]

It seems to me that the agents who post and comment on RCG are ‘mom and pop’ agents whose business is limited to their ability to work with clients directly throughout the real estate transaction. I’ve not heard from any of the ‘Walmart’ agents who have built organizations allowing them no upper limit on their [...]

It’s amazing the stories I hear about the self-policing that occurs on the MLS (some of it seems more like snitching, in my opinion). One of the big no-no’s is listing any reference to an open house in a listing’s marketing remarks. The reason for this rule seems clear enough; with so many of [...]

“Allow myself to introduce….myself” - Austin Powers
I’m in my first few months as a full time working agent. I retired from my career with a successful Internet marketing company after 8 1/2 years of helping grow it from a six person start up to a public company with offices on three continents. I left because [...]

Editor’s Note: I’m excited to introduce Seattle Eric as a new contributor on RCG. It must be six months ago that I first approached Eric to see if he would be interesting in coming on as a contributor because I really liked the writing style he demonstrated on his blog about life as a [...]