Active Rain

Active Rain

Speechless Sundays: Mover Fail
Active Rain

There is More to Blogging in the Rain Than a Gold Star

I appreciated Michael Thornton’s thoughts on featured blogs and the many great blogs out there that seldom or never have shown up on the dashboard. Sadly, some people who write great stuff have stopped their efforts on Active Rain, and it could be that they were discouraged by a lack of recognition. As much as […]
Active Rain

NY Department of State Declares Cease and Desist Zones for Real Estate Solicitations

Parts of the Bronx and Queens have been deemed by NY Secretary of State to be “cease and desist” zones where it is unlawful for real estate licensees to make phone calls, mail flyers or engage in any other activity soliciting business. This is far more wide a prohibition than a Do Not Call list. It is […]
Active Rain

Social Media, and Separating our Business and Personal Lives.

With so much being written on Facebook, Twitter and other social media’s real estate applications, many people are choosing different camps. You have those who embrace social media, many of whom are deriving business from it, and then there are those who are either skeptical or prefer in their words, to separate business and personal. I see […]

Active Rain Speechless Sundays: Mover Fail

Active Rain There is More to Blogging in the Rain Than a Gold Star I appreciated Michael Thornton’s thoughts on featured blogs and the many great blogs out there that seldom or never have shown up on the dashboard. Sadly, some people who write great stuff have stopped their efforts on Active Rain, and it could be that they were discouraged by a lack of recognition. As much as […]

Active Rain NY Department of State Declares Cease and Desist Zones for Real Estate Solicitations Parts of the Bronx and Queens have been deemed by NY Secretary of State to be “cease and desist” zones where it is unlawful for real estate licensees to make phone calls, mail flyers or engage in any other activity soliciting business. This is far more wide a prohibition than a Do Not Call list. It is […]

Active Rain Social Media, and Separating our Business and Personal Lives. With so much being written on Facebook, Twitter and other social media’s real estate applications, many people are choosing different camps. You have those who embrace social media, many of whom are deriving business from it, and then there are those who are either skeptical or prefer in their words, to separate business and personal. I see […]

Active Rain Westchester Putnam MLS Name Change The Westchester Putnam Multiple Listing Service has voted to change its name this morning to the Empire Access Multiple Listing Service. The name change from WPMLS to the EAMLS will be formalized later this year. For years the WPMLS served areas outside Westchester and Putnam Counties, as it has been the dominant MLS in the […]

Active Rain Wordless Wednesday- Love, Active Rain Style

Active Rain The New York Mortgage Broker Conundrum I originated mortgage loans from about 2002 until 2006 or so. I considered starting my own mortgage brokerage but decided against it for several reasons, including the growth of my real estate company and the vast changes in the industry after the sub prime crisis. That required more learning than I could spare if I wanted to […]

Active Rain Reconnecting with Mentors The Westchester-Putnam Association of Realtors has featured me in their monthly spotlight in the Real Estate In Depth publication. The link is a pdf and the article is on page 11. It is a nice piece, and as much as I am tempted to beat my chest, much of my interview for the article was actually on […]

Active Rain Leveraging Your Track Record. There are several must-have components of a good expired listing campaign, such as consistency, a wide footprint, a unique value, and several other things, but one thing that is essential once you are in front of a prospective listing is to have them understand that you are good. You specialize in selling homes other brokers could […]

Active Rain I Must be Nuts! I start a new, invitation-only group, and the first 2 people I invite are a Dallas Cowboys and a Boston Red Sox fan! Politics may make strange bedfellows, but so does business! The things I do to feed my kids! All kidding aside you two are the best, and we’ll close the Metroplex and Metrowest […]

Active Rain Expired Listing Mastermind Group Welcome. The group is for agents who are either already outstanding in the field of listing expireds or those who strive to be. A few groundrules: All posts are private. This is not for your hyperlocal, diary, rants, or other sorts of blogs. One agent per market only, please. We can’t give our secrets away […]

Active Rain Two Wrongs Don’t Make a Right This past weekend, to my surprise, a brief rant of mine entitled Treat My Yard Sign Like Your Own was featured on the dashboard and got quite a few comments. Most agreed with my premise that the agent who removed my sign from my old listing without telling me where it was taken should have […]

Active Rain Happy Father’s Day, You Virile Studs A happy day to all of you titans of tadpoles, you efficacious fountains of fertility, you powerfully potent performers, you mighty ruffians of reproduction. I hope you have a great day. I’m taking Sunday off myself. Of course, getting one past the goalie really doesn’t make a father in my book, and my own dad […]

Active Rain Treat My Yard Sign Like Your Own The majority of my listings are expired property previously listed by other brokers. On occasion, they have not collected their lockbox or sign when it is time for my own, and while I can’t typically remove their lockbox, I can put their sign on the side of the garage or in an innocuous place. There have been […]

Active Rain Senate Passes Tax Credit Deadline Extension It isn’t through the house yet, but apparently some Senators or their kids haven’t closed on their new house yet and they saw that thousands of people would lose out on the stimulus tax credit if something wasn’t done. While I love to sardonically suspect self interest, I don’t care what the motivation was, because […]

Active Rain Why is the NY Times So Focused on Race in its Real Estate Articles? Are you a bigot who wants to be steered toward towns with a certain demographic? I can’t help you out, but the New York Times seems very eager to pitch in. This past February, Elsa Brenner did a nice hatchet job on my neighboring village of Pleasantville, NY featuring this pearl of wisdom, where she […]

Active Rain Post Closing Celebration This is a photo of a recent lunch I took clients to after we closed on their property in Astoria, New York. I sold the house myself. The clients are Bill and Sam Runyon, and I have known Bill since about 1990 when I lived in Philadelphia after college. Bill was the stepfather of my […]

Active Rain The Difference in My Commission is Smaller Than Your Next Price Decrease. In two separate cases recently, I have had agents in my company attempt to list a home and lose the decision to another broker who promised a lower commission. In both cases, the homes were very expensive, and the homeowners justified their decisions based on how much they’d save if they paid 1% less in […]

Active Rain Market Value is What Buyers are Willing to Pay I have had a number of discussions with home owners lately where they make a reference to the “market value” of their home, as in “well, the market value of my home is $500,000, so I won’t take that $475,000 offer.” This is faulty logic. The market value of a home is not some figure published somewhere. […]

Active Rain Why Facebook Matters in Real Estate I may have contributed to a small controversy yesterday when I suggested Alex Chang’s Placing all your online focus on Google SEO today…is like betting on Yahoo! 5 years ago for a feature. I’m probably not the only one who flagged the post, but it did start a “Google vs Facebook” debate which is probably the biggest non sequitor […]