Category — Info

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Poor John, he’s an older guy who got bit by technology.

Nothing on the web is anonymous. You’re required to have a corporate email address so they can keep tabs on you.  Your surfing at work is logged in the office routers. When you delete a file it still exists - all you did was delete the reference to that file in the table of contents. Cheap forensics software can recover almost anything. Some students did a study on used hard drives a while back and what they found was astounding.

The last thing you want is to be on a roll and some ugly stuff pop up from a previous relationship years ago.

Back when I was running my investment management company, we often met with potential clients who asked us to do a portfolio analysis. More often than not, they were surprised to see their portfolio wasn’t doing as well as they thought. This was mainly due to the fact that they didn’t understand ROI or Return On Investment. Once we calculated every little expense & fee they were paying, the return on their investments was a good deal less that what they thought. They were focused on the stock charts. We were focused on their actual worth. For the same amount of risk, they could have been doing a lot better.

As a broker and business person, ROI is one of your most important metrics - don’t leave home without it.

Measuring ROI allows you to compare apples to apples; to see how different search or newspaper campaigns are performing against each other. It helps you make decisions like where to spend your marketing dollars and where to spend your time. And it’s even effective in evaluating your current split. Most brokers are paying an enormous amount of their income to a managing broker - but what’s the return?
To answer that measure your ROI. To do that just divide your net income (before taxes) by ALL your costs (split, marketing, franchise fees, advertising, tech expenses, etc.). You’ll end up with a percentage. The larger the percentage, the better off you are.

Here’s a spreadsheet to get you started: ROI Calculator.
Next time you’re about to do a direct mailing, get this spreadsheet out and run the numbers. Keep a running history of your various marketing campaigns and in keeping track of ROI, some interesting patterns will emerge.

Here’s another one. I haven’t seen it but I’ve got tonight’s episode Tivoed

Real Estate Confidential

Description:

Real Estate Confidential
Most people only see their real estate agent when they’re touring houses or at closing. FINE LIVING’s Real Estate Confidential goes behind the scenes of the real estate world to find out what happens before the “SOLD” sign goes up! The action behind closed doors is an arena filled with enormous amounts of phone calls, wheeling and dealing, and the nerve-wracking rollercoaster ride of negotiations leaves homeowners’ lives hanging in the balance. We meet a team of hungry, funny, and professional real estate agents who show us how realtors price homes, how to best prepare your house for a quick sale, and what type of imaginative and often wild strategies work best in order to “sweeten the deal” when bidding on a home.