Chris Oliver's Lake Blog

God bless us for being in a rural market. If you're not, I don't envy you. As we all know, the conventional loan for first time buyers had dried up and gone away. Most of them don't have the down payment after all the years of down payment assistance programs and the like. But here in a rural mar...

I read something earlier that got me thinking about  balancing professional distance and friendship. A blog suggested that it is  wrong to have very many listings because it would take away from the time you could devote to a single client. According to  him, all your time should be spent on this...

Whewww. Time to put my feet up and have a glass of  wine. It's days like today that you either need to love real estate or find another profession. Property inspection in the AM &  showing in the afternoon. Did I get a contract? Nooooooooo but I do have a great rapport with my clients, we have id...

I read the blog post of "Why would you do this to your client"  discussing the lack of pictures  some agents listings consistently have and then I went to Yahoo. Lord Goodness!! There's nothing that  makes me want to show a 2.6 mil house more than a listing with no pictures, no address, no detail...

Monday didn't start well. A contract tanked on the last day of due diligence. Bummer.  This was a client who had been negotiating for weeks and finally got the concessions he wanted. What the hey........?? The seller and I discussed strategy and tried to dissect what went wrong. Then we raised th...

My friend is thinking of changing agencies. Naturally, I told her to come on down the street and join ours, I know for a fact that she is a steady producer, works full  time and has a great relationship with her clients. So I had to ask, "Why?". This is not the best of markets and is in fact, one...

I am old enough to remember the day when it was an accepted fact that computers were going to make our lives soooooo much easier. And in some regards, they do. E-mail is vastly preferable to listening to musak on hold or, God Forbid, hunting down a convenient pay phone back when dinosaurs roamed ...

As most Georgia agents know, the effects of last years' drought continues to plague Ga. lakes. Lanier & many others are still nowhere near full pool and while this summer has provided more rain and some relief, it's been sporadic. Between the Governments of Ga. and neighboring states, the Corp of...

Well, we updated the mls data here on lake Oconee and Sinclair and for a week I've mostly just been looking at them and trying to guess which way the wind will blow. We break it down here and carve out the categories of Lake Homes and 'Everything else'. and with what we've got showing, it's all a...

I know I am a very lucky agent. I actually have good clients and good leads. It may be a poor market - I believe the technical term is 'stinky' - but I work hard to get and keep my people on the buyers' side. I also work hard to find them what they want, not what I think they should have. One cli...