Rain City Guide

We lost IT. We use to have IT and now we lost IT and now you can get it on ebay! This IT is that huge chunk of our commission that used to come from being the gatekeeper to the multiple. At a listing presentation our competition was only another agent that charged the [...]

Ah, finally get to catch up on reading some RCG posts. What a prolific group this is! Makes you wonder just how important a degree in creative writing might become to the average agent in the future. I’ve been busy cuz I’ve been doing alot of recruiting these days.  So, when Eric, in a recent post  wonders about the mega agent [...]

And some ask why the government is so fixated on organized real estate. It is because of this mindset and the audacity to shout it out to the world…
I tactfully tell my sellers if I reduce my commission to 4 percent or 5 percent, the buyer’s agents will show my listings last only [...]

We’ve been talking down there in the comments about all of the things agents are “not allowed” to do. One benefit of being an independent is that you can be an avant-gardist and try out new and different things from time to time. I had this idea. Everyone knows that when you [...]

I came home today and as usual, looked through the mail.  There was the ordinary bills (yuck!), magazines, no fan mail (rats!) and the assorted direct mail pieces (which I normally drop in the round file).  One piece stood out because it was a picture of a house with the words “How much is your home worth?  Interested, [...]

Most of you have (or should have) read the recent article by STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT (Freakonomics) in the NY Times. As may be expected, there were plenty comments on the Freakonomics Blog. As I was reading the comments, one struck me. It was from a very sincere sounding [...]

Heard an interesting interview with economist Steven Levitt on NPR this morning. He co-wrote an article that will be coming out in the New York Times Magazine titled Endangered Species - The future of real estate agents. He dicusses all of the innovations going on right now in real estate and how like travel agents [...]

Realtors are the subject of another balanced-but-critical New York Times article today. This time it’s for a whole host of lobbying-related fair market-blocking activities.
Frankly, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for banks, but the strong-arm tactics of the National Association of Realtors described in the article make banks look like victims [...]