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2. Selling Your Home and Keeping the Profit

Recently I saw an online article discussing a new real estate agent who was looking for input and direction. The agent had been in real estate sales for one year and, despite having prospected over 3,000 people personally, still had not closed a single transaction. Needless to say, the agent was frustrated.

Prospecting and having systems for prospecting are important components for developing new real estate clients. But prospecting is only the beginning part of the formula. The other part is successfully enrolling your prospects in working with you exclusively. This latter part brings into play the quality of your people skills and how good you are at having others feel that they'd like to work with you.

In the case of the new agent mentioned above, they certainly prospected enough people to uncover a solid amount of new real estate business. Depending on the area they're working in and the level of activity right now, between 1 in 7 to 1 in 15 of the prospects in the area will be involved in a real estate transaction over any one-year period. For the new agent, this means that between 200 and 430 of the 3,000 people prospected were going to be involved in real estate transactions in the weeks and months ahead. This translates into a lot of new business that the new agent missed out on! What probably happened is the agent might have been poor on their follow-up with the prospects, and/or their own presentation skills might have actually repelled people from wanting to do business with them.

I've noticed myself what I'm referring to here when residential real estate agents who work in my area contact me. There are those I know I would consider working with when the time comes to buy or sell a home, and there are others I'd have no interest in working with whatsoever. This conclusion is drawn from the quality of the mailers I receive from the agents, and how I feel when I interact with them personally. So as I notice the responses that these agents continually generate within me, I know that the same effect is happening with the prospects you're continually working with also.

For those prospects who don't like the impression an agent gives them, they might simply tell the agent that they have no upcoming real estate needs at all when in fact they know they'll be doing something in the weeks and months ahead. It's simply easier for some people to say something like this rather than tell the agent the truth and then have to fight them off later on because they don't want to work with them.

So the question I have for you is this:

How are your people skills with the prospects you want to be working with? Do you continually project that you are professional, likeable, and someone they would want to do business with?

The prospects you're looking for are always there in your area and they're busy closing transactions every single year. When you've mastered both locating them and having them want to work with you exclusively, you'll be well on your way to achieving the success you've always imagined for yourself in this business.

Click here for live audio interviews with top-producing real estate agents. These are interviews with industry experts who show you exactly what they do to continually be top producers.

2. Selling Your Home and Keeping the Profit

There's an interesting trend that's beginning to develop with some homeowners right now. The current tax law in the United States that allows homeowners to sell their homes and pocket up to $500,000.00 in profits tax free is creating some interesting options for people. Of course there are rules about how long you must own the home for and how long you need to have lived in it, too. As I am a real estate trainer and not a tax expert, I suggest you refer to your own expert in this arena for how this law may apply to you and your exact situation.

But what some homeowners are doing is selling their home, pocketing the profits, and sitting on the sidelines and renting for awhile. These people are thinking that they might as well take the tax free profit that's available to them right now, and not risk having their home drop in value as many people have been predicting might happen for sometime now. All-in-all the people opting to do this are betting that any loss in annual tax deductions from home ownership will be more than offset by any loss in value that will be avoided if home prices drop substantially. They can then purchase a home at a later date when prices are lower, in anticipation of beginning another cycle of appreciating home values. And if they time it all correctly, they'll ideally have a large tax free gain coming their way again if they choose to sell the home at the right time.

This of course assumes that these people have extraordinary intuition about when home values will be peaking and if and when they'll hit bottom again.

Looking back through our history, home ownership used to be a steady, long-term investment decades ago in the United States. We never used to see these wide swings in appreciation and depreciation in home values that we've witnessed in many geographical areas over the past 35 years. With this in mind, some homeowners have decided to take what they've seen in these market cycles and utilize these trends in an effort to "time the market" in these up and down cycles. They figure they'd rather pocket up to hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits tax free right now, rent for awhile, and buy another home again when the prices are much more attractive.

Only time will tell if this strategy will be the right one for these people, or if long-term home ownership would still have been the best choice they could have made.

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