I think there was a bit of confusion about the location of this carnival this week.  I’ll be hosting it on my new website TheExitPro.com.  Head on over and check it out…

It takes exposure to get a home sold… a lot of it.  Exposure with yard signs, newspaper ads, open houses, MLS listings, and most recently online… where 87% of buyers begin their home search.  If you’re home isn’t being properly marketed online, I have to ask you, “What the heck are you doing?”  You sure aren’t getting your home sold.  Let’s look at what should be going on with your property online and what you can proactively do about it…

Property Exposure

I went to a short ‘class’ at our regional MLS office today.  The class was about ListHub (more in a minute) and all the ways they can help syndicate our brokerage’s listings online. To give you a little background, the Arkansas Regional MLS does not syndicate listings without a broker’s permission.  Up until now, our company, EXIT Pro Realty, has been manually entering our listings into a proprietary EXIT software called EXIT E-listings.  E-listings then syndicates the listing out to many of the same sites that list hub does.  FYI, other real estate companies (I’m speaking generally so don’t get offended if you are an agent) don’t offer a listing syndication solution like E-listings.  It’s truly an amazing system and allows EXIT agents and their clients to get a definite leg up on the competition.

Enter ListHub, Stage Right

Back to the class… ListHub has partnered with the ARMLS to syndicate listings in the database free of charge.  FREE?  Yes, free.  All a broker has to do is opt-in to the arrangement and their listings will appear on dozens of real estate websites like Zillow, Trulia, Hotpads, Yahoo Real Estate, and many more.  How many people were in the meeting?  Five.  Including yours truly.  Frankly, the idea of ListHub is awesome.  Get your listings exposed to 28 million online buyers a month all over the world on every major real estate search portal…. and it’s all done automatically.

Proper Property Marketing for 2009

As a marketing professional that realizes the power and value of that, I signed our company up on the spot… we’re even going for the premium version with agent accounts and a complete suite of metrics to help ourselves and our clients see where we should be focusing our marketing efforts.

Is your agent marketing your property like that?  The sad fact is, probably not.

Now I’m not knocking real estate agents, It’s just a matter of understanding where your efforts should be focused.  Many agents (especially in our market) have their nose to the grindstone and simply aren’t investing in the ideas and technology that will help their clients today.  Many are stuck in an advertising quandary with no clear idea of how to focus their marketing efforts for their clients.  This has never been more apparent to me than when I attended this ListHub meeting and find fewer than 5% of agents in our marketplace represented.

Now that I’ve said my piece, I’ll just say this:

When you interview an agent to list your property, one of the questions I would ask is, “Exactly where is my property listed online?”  If your agent doesn’t seem to have a very clear and concise understanding and answer to that simple yet powerful question, I would go interview another agent… I’m just sayin’.

The fact is,  just like a business needs a business plan to grow and prosper, so too does a home.  If your agent doesn’t have a detailed written marketing strategy that they will follow to exposure your property to the world, you need to find one that does.

You can find a sample of our general EXIT written marketing plan (and a humorous presentation) if you go here and fill in your information.  We don’t simply give that kind of proprietary information out for nothing…

I hope you enjoyed my article (a bit of a rant) and feel free to contact me or any of our agents to learn more about the specific ways we market properties to sell for the highest possible price, with the best terms and conditions, in the shortest amount of time.

I just read a couple of thought enticing (possibly horrifying) articles about the ‘next wave’ of foreclosures.  There’s been a lot of speculation since Bloomberg released data explaining that 7 million more foreclosure were sitting in bank inventory.  Then, Rob Saxe wrote a bit pessimistic (not that I can blame him) article about the same.  Now, Check out my 2 minute video on the ’shadow inventory’ coming on the market…

7 Million Properties…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks for watching/reading.  Stay tuned for more on this hot topic in the coming weeks.  You can also contact me for specific information about your area or neighborhood.

Note:  FYI, my office doesn’t have fake wall paneling if you were wondering about the video background… I was working one of our subdivision open houses when I recorded the video.

I had just about forgotten that I signed up EXIT Pro to host the Carnival this month.  This past Tuesday I started getting blog carnival emails and realized… “oh yeah, we’re hosting the carnival this week.”  With that said, this week’s carnival theme is “Meat ‘n Taters.”

No offense to the vegetarians…

We’re BIG on technology around EXIT Pro.  One thing we try to keep our agents from losing sight of is the fact that real estate is about people, not technology.  To keep that in mind for us and for the rest of the real estate community, we thought we’d get back to basics and talk about the meat ‘n taters of real estate.  We also love to propagate the stereotypes of  the deep south so the theme accomplishes two goals.  This week’s carnival winners will be loosely based on how well they apply some of the basic real estate principles of networking, prospecting, closing, yadda yadda.  Of course, we’ll recognize other posts that tickle our worcestershire (that’s a steak joke).

Bring on the articles and submit some posts!  We’ve got 25 or so agents with their steak knives sharpened and ready to slice into some juicy real estate blogs!

Just as the butterfly emerges from it’s chrysalis, so to does EXIT Pro Realty.  In less colorful prose, we’re moving just down the street to #6 Halsted Circle in Rogers.  It just sounds so much better the other way.  The new digs will give EXIT Pro Realty a chance to really spread it’s metaphorical wings and grow into the business that agents around Northwest Arkansas have previously, only dreamed.

EXIT Pro’s New Office

We try not to toot our horn before it’s all said and done so here is just a preview of what’s to come:

• Room for at least 45 full-time agents
• Complete live-interactive training center
• Multi-use space for every conceivable need
• High Speed T1 duplexing Internet access

EXIT Pro’s about to have a physical office to match it’s big-time ideas for training, Internet exposure, technology, and family atmosphere.  Look out for some updates by week’s end with new office pictures and a date for our grand opening bash!

There are so many websites, networks, papers, radio and tv stations, magazines, and water coolers in Northwest Arkansas it’s kind of hard to keep track with what’s actually going on… especially what’s going on right now.  Well, for those of you that use Twitter (and I know there are a bunch of you), now we’ve got Twubs – Twitter Hubs to help us keep track.  In this article, I’ll explain what Twubs is, what the heck hashtags are, and how it all helps you keep up with your favorite place in the world, Northwest Arkansas…

Using Hashtags on Twitter to organize, categorize, and informatize

Okay, so that last one isn’t a word, but I think you get the idea.  If you aren’t sure what Twitter is, you should probably watch this video then read on…

Now that you know what Twitter is (as if you didn’t already) let’s talk hashtags.

A user-created standard for identifying tweets belonging to a topic. Simply include the tag in your tweet and other people searching for the same tag will be able to find it.

Sounds simple huh?  It actually is.  Just add a “#” in front of whatever word you want to use as a hashtag and people searching that word, subject, event, etc.  will easily find your tweet, along with all the others with the same hashtag.

So how would I use this and where do I find them?

You can see a list of all the registered hashtags at hashtag.org or you can just make one up and hope others start using it.  I recently started using #realtips to microblog short, simple tips to help buyers and sellers achieve their real estate goals.  You can find some of the hashtags that are commonly used in Northwest Arkansas by checking out my Twubs page.  It looks like many people are using #NWAsocial and NWAtweet to talk about Northwest Arkansas.

Seriously, how is this useful?

I like metaphors so think of it like this…

You’re at a cocktail party with all your friends, just chatting away. The party is you and all your twitter followers.

Across town there is another party, a chic, jazzy affair.  This party is another, unconnected group of twitterers.

There’s a guy, Billy, sitting in his basement wondering what the party scene is like tonight so he decides to use the #nwaparty hashtag to find out if anyone is talking about any good parties happening in Northwest Arkansas.  He sends a tweet out:  “Any buck parties happening tonight? #nwaparty”

It so happens that multiple people from each party Billy doesn’t follow happen to be tweeting about the “buck” party they are attending and how everyone should be there…plus they are using the #nwaparty hashtag to help others find their tweets.  Now Billy searches for the #nwaparty hashtag and has to make a choice.  Does he go to the cocktail party or the chic, jazzy affair?

This can be done with any subject, event, party, gathering, etc. that you might be able to conjure up.  Try it out.  Now you can see all the related tweets about any subject, area, or event in one spot.  That’ s pretty powerful right?

Don’t take my word for it…

Try it out.  You can see some of the hashtags I have embedded on this site here or go to twubs.com and check out some others.  Remember to join some of your favorites to make it easier to keep track of your area, interest, or event and start using #hashtags in your tweets to help them be easier to find by other people.  Trust me, the more you use them, the more you’ll like them, the more you’ll use them, etc, ad nauseum.

Northwest Arkansas has been ranked the #2 best place for recession recovery according to research done by Forbes magazine.  We all know Northwest Arkansas is a great place to live and work.  Now the rest of the country knows it too.  What that mean for the future is good news for all of us in Northwest Arkansas…

As the article in Forbes says, “What better way to sit pretty during a recession than to have the ultimate recession-proof company headquartered in your neighborhood.”  People can say what they want about Wal-mart but I think we could all give a quick thank-you to the retail giant that has helped us weather the on-going storm.

A quick rundown of the Forbes article.

Northwest Arkansas placed second behind Austin Texas as a candidate for quick recovery.  Other areas that made the list were:

• Boulder Colorado
• Huntsville Alabama
• San Antonio Texas
• Mobile Alabama
• Dallas-Fort Worth
• Washington DC
• McAllen Texas
• Seattle-Tacoma Washington

The article’s choices were based on several criteria:

• Moody’s projected gross domestic product (GDP) of metropolitan areas across the US
• Unemployment figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
• Home prices, incomes and affordability data from the National Association of Home Builders

The Fayetteville-Springdale-Rogers MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) has a current GDP of $13.9 Billion and an estimated GDP of $14.5 Billion by the end of 2010.  After a quick visit to the calculator, I see that’s an increase of over 4.3% in Gross Domestic Product over the next 18 months.

Unemployment is much lower than the national average at 5.0% and you can see our most current home prices in the market conditions section of this site.

What’s this mean for the Northwest Arkansas Housing Market?

It depends on your situation.  If you are planning on buying a home but aren’t buying until the fall of 2009 or later, this isn’t really good news for you.  As you’ll see in our upcoming market and home prices report, absorption rates are stabilizing, prices are higher than they were a few months ago, and interest rates are up a percentage point from their lows of a few weeks ago.  All things being considered though…there is still a large selection on the market and some killer deals to be had this summer.

If you are a homeowner, business owner, or just a Northwest Arkansas resident…this is some pretty good news that will only get better.  Higher home prices means more disposable income, which means more spending and saving, which ultimately means a happier, healthier economy here at home.

Here’s a sneak peak of what you’ll see in the home prices report this month…

I don’t know how you read it but I read “the bottom has passed.”  There’s still time to get in on some deals of the century though.  Contact EXIT Pro Realty today to find out more about the 8,000 tax credit, low interest rates, RD loan program, and a host of other great things that make now the right time to buy.

40/29 News just did a feature story on new home sales activity and a rise in home prices in Northwest Arkansas.  If you were waiting for ‘bottom’ to buy or refinance you may have already missed it.  But it’s not too late!  Check out this video from 40/20 News featuring our own Executive Broker, Larry Robison, talking about new home sales.

Here’s the link to the video about New Home Sales and Home Prices in Northwest Arkansas.

There’s a lot more to it

If you watched the whole 2 minute or so video you would have heard that home prices in Northwest Arkansas rose from $137,000 in February up to $168,000 in May.  That’s my statistic that we gave them and I can explain that number a little bit.

Did home prices rise by almost 23% in three months?

The short answer is no, not really.  But it’s still very good news.  The numbers in February were so low because a greater percentage of the sales were foreclosed or distressed properties.  This artificially drove the average sales price down to $137,000….actually $137,521 to be exact.  In May, we say a much more significant number of home sales were traditional property sales, driving the average sales price back up to $168,181.

Here’s the graph of average home sale prices over the past few months:

Encouraging isn’t it?  It’s also encouraging that there are builders building new homes and filling up subdivisions again.

What’s the moral of the story?

• Take advantage of interest rates
• Take advantage of the 8,000 tax credit available to buyers until the end of the year.
• Take advantage of historically low home prices that are already disappearing

The moral is TAKE ADVANTAGE.

Feeling the need to search for homes?  Head to my map-based home search here.

Two great looking houses are open to the public this weekend at Waterford Park in Bentonville.  Read about Waterford Park and then head to the open house this weekend for a look at some awesome homes, as well as some food and fun.

Elegant Luxury close to town

Waterford Park is located five miles west of Walton Boulevard on Highway 72.  Located in Bentonville School District, Waterford Park began as a development in 2005.  Many lots are available but only the two homes with open houses this weekend are for sale.  Lot sizes range from0.75 to over 1 acre lots.  Home prices in Waterford Park range from around 300,000 all the way up to 600,000 or more.  Most homes in the subdivision are a french country European style.

Enjoy two incredible open houses

Head over on Sunday, May 3 from 1-6pm to enjoy 2 different open houses priced from $395,000 to $449,900.  11837 Lakenheath Drive is offered by our own Michelle Osborn (479) 544-8236 and 11624 Teddington Court is offered by Don Richardson of Century 21 Exclamation Realty.  Both houses are open this Sunday from one until six.  Bring your wet-naps because ribs are on the menu along with potato salad, baked beans, and all the fixins’.

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Register to Win a Trip…Seriously.

Come by the Waterford Park open house this weekend and register for a good chance to win a free 3 day, 2 night vacation to one of many resort locations from worldwide travel center.  Travel  include Phoenix Arizona, Napa Valley California, San Francisco, New Orleans, Orlando, Key West, Destin, Branson, Las Vegas, Hilton Head, and many more.

Check out the flyer below for more information.

Who would have thought that a brand new real estate company could have such impressive results so quickly?  EXIT Pro Realty of Rogers Arkansas has a group of New Home Specialists that, as of mid-April 2009, have wrapped up almost 25% market share in the new homes market of Northwest Arkansas.    As a new office with less than 30 agents, EXIT Pro looks to be a force to be reckoned with in the new homes market and beyond.

The numbers don’t lie.

In new homes from 1700 up to 2500 square feet in Rogers, Bentonville, Centerton, Springdale, and Fayetteville; EXIT Pro Realty sold or has pending 21 of the 85 homes that have sold since November 22nd, 2008.  That comes out to 24.7% market share of all new construction homes in the area.

The numbers go higher.

If you look at the same numbers for just Rogers, Bentonville, and Centerton the percent of new homes sold in that period goes up to 29.8%.

Why does EXIT have so much of the Market?

Good question.  It’s a couple of factors really.

1. Professional, dedicated, dependable agents man these new subdivisions and follow up with their clients and leads.
2. EXIT Pro is selling a high quality, low priced product that can even compete with the large (but dwindling) foreclosure market in Northwest Arkansas.
3. No other office sells homes like this as a TEAM.  Real estate agents are generally territorial by nature so it takes a lot of trust and respect to share the way EXIT Pro’s New Homes Team does.

So where are you going when you are in the market for a quality new home?

If your answer isn’t one of the Realtor’s names on the New Homes Team at EXIT Pro Realty….Frankly, I don’t think I can help you any further.  Seriously though, these are great homes at great prices and you get to deal with professional agents that make New Homes their Specialty.  Call the New Homes Team at the office (479)636-7777 today to schedule private showings, get help with financing, or find out more about any of the fabulous subdivisions and builders we represent.

ATTENTION NORTHWEST ARKANSAS REAL ESTATE AGENTS!  The New Homes Team Needs You!

As a result of the recent jump in buyer interest in our new homes and subdivisions we need more help.  The New Homes Team is taking on new quality builders and expanding the number of homes we have on the ground for sale.  We need professional, dependable real estate agents that are interested in working with new home buyers.  Our agents are getting as many as 30 leads a day working open houses in these subdivisions and need help!

If you are looking for a place to call home you have to call EXIT Pro Realty and ask about our New Homes Team.  Whether you are a new agent or have 20 years of experience, our new homes team is a great place to get qualified buyers looking to purchase a home now.  Contact us today to schedule a confidential interview and tour of our facilities and subdivisions.

Note:  While I am a Realtor and the Director of Internet Marketing at EXIT Pro Realty in Rogers, I do not benefit directly from soliciting new buyers or agents for the new homes team.  I genuinely care for the homeowners and real estate professionals in Northwest Arkansas and want to see everyone prosper.  That said – Homeowners – these truly are rare deals that are high quality, low cost homes…you’ll never be sorry you purchased one.  Realtors – the New Homes Team really is an awesome way to get new clients and build your business in a down market.  Please let me know if any of you have questions that I can answer.