Nu-Way Real Estate Training Articles

Author: Sarah Reiter

The real estate industry has been around for more than fifty years in the United States. The arrival of the virtual assistant and the VA industry occurred in the 1990s and has experienced a steady growth every year since its inception and is expected to continue growing at a steady rate. There has been a significant increase in the numbers of individuals choosing to start privately owned VA practices as an alternative to the uncertainty of conditions in the workforce today such as company downsizing and the outsourcing of jobs to the cheaper labor markets in other countries. A virtual assistant is an individual who agents outsource some work and projects to that would require an agent to spend many hours in an office to complete, when an agent needs to be outside the office working with clients, vendors, contractors, and others in order to be a successful professional. Some of that work includes maintaining client files, online transaction coordination, receiving faxes, creating reports, developing and managing email and other marketing campaigns, and even website designing, among other general office work that agents often find themselves too busy to handle themselves. The internet has impacted how transacting is done today. The internet allows fast downloading and printing of important reports such as listings, industry projections, market indicators, and much more. This has created a wealth of information that is available for the agent to use in their conducting of transactions, and provides consumers with more detailed information than what was easily available to them before. Setting up different programs to gather and organize this information takes some time and for this reason, many agents today will outsource such work to a virtual assistant.

This is an interesting tidbit provided by the information that virtual assistants taking an anonymous internet poll shared. Over 90 percent of those who are working as a VA are women. Rising child care costs, the desire to work from home, high income potential, and spending more time with family were the most often given responses for why to choose to open a VA work at home business. Another question in this anonymous polling of virtual assistants asked respondents to share how much income they make yearly working as an assistant. An averaging of the responses showed that the annual gross income of a virtual assistant is around $29,000, with some making more than $200,000 in annual gross income.

Author: Andy Asbury

Home buyers and sellers spend a lot of time on the Internet, but they can only do so much. Once you get someone’s attention online you have to work to keep things interesting, and convince them to come back again. In online real estate there are many strategies you can employ to keep people on your website, but be careful - too much information or eye candy can confuse potential clients. The best policy is often to keep things simple, and make sure visitors get what they want.Many Realtors think they can get more business simply by having more websites, but it doesn’t work that way. Too many slightly different websites offering the same service can dilute a company’s brand, and confuse people. You might also spend a lot of time building websites that compete against each other, while another company takes all the business with a single prominent site, and a clear message. Having multiple “company” websites might also lead a user to believe that your services are in fact controlled by someone else, or that you operate online for affiliate purposes - never a good thing if you want people to contact you directly. What most successful real estate professionals do instead is put all their effort into a single, excellent website. This way they can keep all their best imagery and content in a single place, refer everybody to the same website, and really polish their brand. These agents and brokers might blog all over the place, and participate in social networking sites and forums, but everyone knows they keep their best material on their own website. It’s also important to make sure your website content is informative and fun to read. Users may not want to a lot of copy when they arrive on your homepage, but they’ll appreciate clear, catchy directions to the reading material. The challenge for many Realtors is figuring out how to present their services and information differently from  other Realtors. Real estate marketing material is often presented the same way over and over, so it’s important to emphasize your own voice and quickly get to the point of what you can do for the user.

Author: Shareen Aguilar

Just because expert real estate agents get all the attention that each real estate agent desires from their leads, it doesn’t mean that you have to follow every single action they have done to get to where they are right now. There is a difference from creating your very own idea to actions from just taking one from somebody. Though most real estate experts would love to share what they have done before they get the kind of success they have right now, it would always be considered a self-accomplishment if you tried to work things out onyour own.This doesn’t mean though that there is no need to follow the footsteps of the successful real estate marketers. There are always new things that you’ll learn in trying to pursue your own path in real estate marketing and learning from the mistakes of others is a good option. Well, better yet, an ideal move for you to take. A few of the genuine marketing approaches you can try in prospecting clients are more based on the positive side of a person’s personality. You can never be an effective real estate agent if you see everything as something you have to do, as if there are no other choices left for you. Learn to develop the skill of loving what you do in terms of prospecting clients everyday. Aside from the devoted hour(s) for your prospecting task, you also need to make sure that you establish a good rapport with your prospect. They have to feel that losing them would really make a huge difference in your business. Make them feel that they are important to you and every aspect of your business. One way of simply making your prospects feel important is to give them emotional assistance. By acknowledging whatever situation they are in at the moment, you start to build a trusting relationship with them. This will not make them feel that you are just after them for the sake of profit, but their presence and friendship means the world to you.