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The person in the room with the most information wins.
A recent stat I saw a few days ago stated that 73% of Realtors make most of their income from non real estate work. Scary! What if you walked into a coffee shop and the person making your latte was your doctor? I don’t know about you, but that would not instill very much confidence in me about the skill set of my doctor. I know I’m being a bit flip but I really want to drive a point home.
Buying or selling a home today is not easy. Buyers and Sellers want to hire a professional to help them with this process. How professional are you? Are you coming to the table with the most information?
Here are some great sites that can really help you to put together information that will help a seller better understand the market they are about to list a property in, and info to help a buyer understand what their new investment might do as far as appreciation is concerned.
Keep in mind these guys have money on the line when it comes to mortgage insurance. Their research on the future of certain markets tends to be very accurate.
Housing Predictor provides independent real estate market forecasts on home prices and mortgage rates for more than 230 cities in all 50 U.S. states, plus news and analysis on the housing market.
The Act gave FHFA the authorities necessary to oversee vital components of our country’s secondary mortgage markets – Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks.
They have collected and analyzed data from numerous sources to create as complete and interesting profiles of all U.S. cities as they could. They have over 74,000 city photos not found anywhere else, graphs of latest real estate prices and sales trends, recent home sales, home value estimator, hundreds of thousands of maps, satellite photos, stats about residents (race, income, ancestries, education, employment…), geographical data, state profiles, crime data, registered sex offenders, cost of living, housing, religions, businesses, local news links based on our exclusive technology, birthplaces of famous people, political contributions, city government finances and employment, weather, tornadoes, earthquakes, hospitals, schools, libraries, houses, airports, radio and TV stations, zip codes, area codes, air pollution, latest unemployment data, time zones, water systems and their health and monitoring violations, comparisons to averages, local poverty details, professionally written city guides, car accidents, fires, bridge conditions, cell phone and other towers, mortgage data, business storefront photos, a forum and a social network with 1,000,000 registered members and 18,000,000 posts, blogs, 5,000 user-submitted facts, 27,000 exclusive local business profiles with photos, restaurant inspection results, and more demographics. If you ever need to research any city, zip code, or neighborhood for any reason, from considering a move there to just checking where somebody you know is staying, this is the site for you.
Being factual today is more important than ever.
Seems that today everyone and their mother are walking around with hand held smart phones and they have them in quick draw mode. More so than ever you need to make sure you know what your talking about these days.
My father is a great example of this. In his day when you told a story it was always ok to make some things a bit bigger for the sake of a good story, and if you didn’t know the exact answer then you just made something up. Heck I still do that to this day but what I’m finding out is that your BS can be easily discovered in a matter of minuets. My son who is 7 asked his grandfather one day, “why the Ocean is salty?” The answer that was given, although not correct none the less, was amusing and my 7 year old took it hook line and sinker. But standing behind my father was my 18 yr old Nephew. The one person that if your facts aren’t in line then get ready because with 3 quick flicks of the finger on the I phone and “Ba Boom!” He has the correct information.
So take the same scenario but instead of a 7 year it’s a customer at your open house and your being asked questions from a potential buyer or seller. You reply with some facts that may or may not be exact. It only takes the savvy customer about 5 minuets to do some fact checking on their smart phone to verify what you have told them to be true.
I’m a strong believer that first impressions are key to a good start to a good relationship. So if this is the case you need to arm yourself with tools and applications that enable you to answer questions accurately. Here are my suggestions.
1. Have a smart phone, my recommendation would be the Driod Google phone or an I phone
2. If you really want to look impressive the I pad is a neat tool with the 3G and wireless connections
3. A simple laptop computer with a aircard from you cell services provider will do the trick.
4. There are many useful Applications on the smart phone to help you access data faster. Here is the Android market place and the I phone app store.
Last but not least remember it is also perfectly ok to say “I don’t know but I can get that answere for you rather quickly.”
If you know of any useful apps I would love for you to share them with our readers.
