Thanks to those of you that left comments on the blog. It has been obvious that the articles of Lender and government abuse have touched on some raw nerves other than mine! I appreciate your feedback and encourage you to be active in your local and national elections. Your voice does make a difference! Our collective apathy has led to our elected officials being enabled to get our nation in the road ditch that it is in! Let’s get it back on the road! We hear that many of you are looking for help to face your real estate challenges. Our mission calls for us to educate, empower and encourage! We will continue to do that for you!
My real estate agent, Humberto, has this sharp, young gentlemen that very much would like to marry into his family! Scott operates as ROI Creative. He openly and notoriously offered to help us with our combined web presence as a method of bribing his future father-in-law! I am glad he did. I think he has done a great job of giving us a useful, professional looking site. Its main purpose was to create tools to provide customer service and give us a platform to make these blog entries and other informational things we do readily accessible. We think it has! A main tool on the site comes with our bright red bold link that takes you to the same data base that we professional brokers use in the Phoenix metro-plex. There are several services that now link to our data base but all but this one either have time lags in the data or different “fields” of search that end up providing misleading material or data that is not in “real-time.”
Just this week, Humberto and I met with a client that has much more fluency in Spanish than English. The couple felt much more comfortable after Humberto showed them on their own computer how to create simple “searches” where they could find all homes in their price range with the features that were important to the family. The number of bedrooms, baths, location, swimming pools, single or multiple levels are just some of the features they can identify for their searches. They can also access all photos and public information the Realtor posted with the listing as well as mapped location. They could do this and see the results instantly rather than struggle with the language challenges of surfing other on-line realty sites that won’t provide totally accurate information anyway.
That said, I want to brag on behalf of our regional group that developed and provides the metro area with its MLS service. They have done an exceptional job. I hear from seminars and other colleagues repeatedly that our MLS is one of the most advanced in the country. Although time and technology bring a lot to bear, it certainly represents the most sophisticated system I have participated in. When I started in Lincoln, NE in the 70’s, we got a weekly book containing our listings. We were so very impressed in the early 80’s when we could pay a premium and get a printer with a dial up connection that whirred and whined to print crude, simple searches on the old style thermo paper that you better not leave on the dash if you wanted to read! I invite agents reading this in other parts of the country to go to our Lamplighteraz.com website and access our MLS through our link and give us your opinion!
Over one year ago, we launched the Distressed Property Academy to assist in our mission stated above. We have done several simple videos and placed them at my callgene4realestate.com for people to use. However, we have not really pushed this endeavor. We are seriously considering changing that. The Phoenix-metro region still has many distressed property issues but as I warned a while back in my “Buy While You Can, Fran” blog, our local market, it is achangin! The number of REO sales have fallen sharply at this point. Foreclosures are down but they certainly have not stopped. After we have preached it from the beginning and some of our organizations such as the CDPE have shouted from the house tops, politician’s offices and news room interviews, short sales are finally being recognized as making more sense and sending out fewer shock waves to the economy than foreclosures.
Many “flippers” are competing to purchase any distressed property available to refurbish and sell or rent. Some of those flippers know what they are doing and produce a good value and product as I wrote about last week. Some do not do a good job because of ignorance and some because they want to take advantage of an unsuspecting, uninformed buyer. There are a lot of buyers competing to find renovated housing that represents value. Many of them are first time buyers who do not have the knowledge to protect themselves properly.
We intend to serve the informational and educational needs of the four groups represented above: 1. First Time homebuyer, 2. Distressed Property Owner, 3. Investor, 4. Anyone seeking to be educated regarding the basic construction issues of a home. We are not sure of the exact form this will all take. We would like to hear from you! We have upgraded our video capabilities a lot. We know we can use video as a tool to serve you, but we want you to tell us what kinds of specific topics you would like to see us cover and what medium you would like us to employ to get this information to you on a user friendly basis.
Please let us hear from you soon but for right now, excuse us! We are headed to Casa Ramos to eat terrific Mexican food and enjoy the live Mariachi music! There are some benefits to helping friends find a great deal on their restaurant. Some of the perks are beta testing the new deserts and dishes being considered. Even though the place has started to be packed every Saturday, Ben has promised us they will always have a booth for us when we come in the door! However, the thing we enjoy most and labored under the false assumption that we were exclusive beneficiaries for comes in the form of feeling like you are going to meet “family” for dinner. We finally figured out that they make everybody in the place feel that way!!
Check out our Lamplighteraz.com web-site for tools and answers to your real estate challenges. Learn about Lamplighter Realty, Lamplighter Financial, and Distressed Property Academy at callgene4realestate.com For your real estate needs, call Gene’s message center for Lamplighter Realty 480-307-6459 or dash off an email to him at gene@lamplighteraz.com. God Bless!
