Your Title Partner

If you are among the many who have been sitting on the proverbial fence of whether or not to buy a home now or later, we need to take a close look at some factors that may impact your decision. Generally, the fear is that one will buy a home now and the value will decline, making it a bad investm...

I try to stay as relevant as possible, but I have had some requests from agents lately, regarding who I would recommend for their professional photos. It's quite simple, really. My wife, Kristen Self is the best photographer I have met. She excels in any fashion of portrait photography. We recent...

We have been working with Realtors for a long time in their pursuit of new business. Since short sales have overtaken roughly 50% of activity in the Phoenix market, many agents have decided to stop avoiding them, get educated and proactively market themselves for short sale listings. We and other...

We've all seen the guys that enjoy a 30% (or better) marketshare by consistently involving themselves in community activities, sending out newsletters and more. Farming a community is costly, and capturing marketshare in a saturated neighbiorhood can be a difficult feat. Recipe postcards aren't a...

In Arizona, the retirement scene is a great place to be if you're a Realtor. As I've mentioned in previous posts, these buyers generally come with cash, so they don't care what the interest rates are. The exchange rate is another story. Canadians are a big source of these buyers. How do we find t...

I have found a way to create home made, high quality, free virtual tours. Okay, it's more like a glorified slideshow with the music of your choice, but it's nice and it will make your sellers happy. I'm going to get a little technical, but I promise that if you were able to get here, you can do t...

Within the escrow "sales" side of our business, there a lot of titles floating around out there: Business Development Manager; Director of This; Supervisor of that...but most title copmanies in Arizona are structered the same way: either you represent business or you don't. The latter nearly does...

Flyers, postcards, labels, listing kits, brochures, virtual tours, and so much more. Title companies have provided (still provide) them to agents on a regular basis in exchange for their transactions, and these items have been through much debate over the years. Title insurers and agents are gove...

I have a list of asset management companies that I've been updating for some time now. It has about 400 lenders and asset managers, with tons of contact info, all in Excel format. For a while, and even after REO was the business to be in, it was useful. We picked up about 6 REO accounts, and 5 of...

Conflicts of interest. We've all seen them: selling candles at the office, blast emailing crap from the comany email server, blogging at work =0)...But what is it about us salespeople being approached by the multi-level marketing companies? Don't get me wrong-sometimes (rarely), the products or s...