Buying and selling residential real estate in Bergen County can be looked at as a contact sport.  At our company, it is all about CONTACT!

Every real estate company and every real estate agent have many tools at their fingertips to utilize to help their clients.  Our question at CENTURY 21 Eudan is: Why don't they use them?  It's simple.  They either don't know about them, don't have the patience to learn about them or they just don't want to spend the money to represent their clients in the utmost and best manner.

CENTURY 21 Eudan utilizes many tools that no other company or agent uses in Bergen County and I would say most of the State of New Jersey.

We use: 24 Hour On Demand Marketing with our hotline extensions for every listing.  We use specific web sites for each of our listings.  We enhance our listings by showcasing them on Realtor.com. We make videos of our listings and upload them to You Tube and 30 to 40 other sites to attract attention and eyeballs.  Our website is the quickest website in the East, by having our visitors only clicking once to see homes available in the town they want!

All in all, these tools get us more leads for our buyers and our agents.  What else does the consumer need....Just us!

As real estate agents, we learn how to do a Comparative Market Analysis, a CMA, when we want to get a listing. That is to get business. Do we ever do a CMA on us, our businesses, the company we work for? For the most part, the answer is no.

As owner of CENTURY 21 Eudan Realty, a 3 office real estate sales organization in Bergen County New Jersey, with offices in Hasbrouck Heights NJ, Washington Twp NJ, and Wood-Ridge NJ, I perform this "look in the mirror' frequently. This is done to make sure the company has the utmost in competitive advantages for all of our agents to succeed. It is then up to our agents to take the tools and systems and use them in their own real estate businesses to succeed.

As real estate people, we understand the premise of a CMA. It is to compare similar homes in the same market to arrive at a price where we feel the house will sell at...and then sell our services and intelligence to the people selling the home. Let's face it, unless one has a great competitive advantage that outshines all other companies, then it's the charisma of the agent and the price for the home they have come up with, that will get or not get the agent the listing.

CENTURY 21 Eudan Realty has that competitive advantage that allows us to succeed. Yes, for the most part in some of our market areas we are new. That is why we are like that rental car company that says "We Try Harder." We not only try, we perform.

Let's compare us with everyone else. OR here are some facts that one should use when doing a CMA on their very own real estate office or company:

Does management compete with you for business?

Is there support staff? Do they help with input of listings? Make sure that you have at least 10 pictures to upload to the many sites...that work?

Does your manager insist on business planning with frequent review and help to make it really work or is this just an exercise you go through?

Do you use the tools that are available? Does your company provide the tools or do you have to pay for them? Would you use them anyway?

Does your company promote you first? Does your company always look for an extra competitive advantage to help its agents?

If you have the right answers for above stop reading this now. If you think your company could do more, you don't know what your missing or want aggressive, do what it takes support email me at dfanale@c21eudan.com

Check this video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m-Hcl-Z7OQ

We have a new President. We have a new feeling in the country. We have a new feeling with the same old frustration and problems we had before January 20, 2009. President Obama calls for all of us to do our part. I, for one, am on board with this directive from our new Commander and Chief.

What will you do?

I will work smarter and harder. As a business owner, I will do whatever it takes, in a responsible and calculated manner to achieve the goals of recovery for the nation and the recovery of the real estate business.

Will I do anything different? Probably not except be more consistent in delivery. Probably not because I and the company have performed our business aggressively and honestly throughout and learned from the mistakes of the past. Probably not simply because my business, CENTURY 21 Eudan Realty, is a service business that has always looked for the cutting edge in technology to give my people, real estate agents, the competitive advantage, the competitive difference to perform their jobs better and more efficiently.

I and my agents do this with responsible honesty, diligence and positive aggressive actions to be successful.

Our culture at CENTURY 21 Eudan Realty is simple: Do what's right for the customer, the community and the company by following our 3 point compass:

1- From the clients point of view, are we treating the customer with the utmost respect?

2- From the client's point of view, am I exceeding the client's expectations?

3- Is what we are doing, in the best long term interest of our businesses and the company?

As a Broker/Owner of a 3 office real estate company in Bergen County, New Jersey, I support my agents' efforts in working with their customers. I read this "compass" over and over again to make sure my agent-my customer is being treated properly, efficiently and profitably by our staff.

As, President Obama stated more than once and I reiterate: I will do whatever it takes to be a part of our country's rejuvenation as well as the ever growing economy of our company. These challenges "will be met."

I wake up every morning, pour my cup of coffee and turn on the TV as I get ready to work out. As the news intrudes in the peace I hope to attain on my treadmill, I feel like why bother. Stories headlining the news are all about "Economy in Crisis." I want to go back to bed. It's a wonder suicides haven't increased just because of the media and all of the negativity we have to deal with on a day to day basis.

Pick a day, any day and what do you hear, read and see: Negativity from the news media. If there is something positive, it's most likely spun to the negative. I don't care if it's CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or local papers like here in Bergen County, New Jersey, The Record. Listening, reading and watching, what do we have to live for?

Let's face it, as they say in marketing: Sex Sells! This is their sexy version of condemning our lives because they want to make money. Nothing wrong with that at all. But just once, how about a positive spin on the economy? How about a positive spin on a bad story.

I never used to read the newspaper or watch the news because it was all about death and destruction, because that's all they had to was to bring negativity into our lives. Over the past few years it has all changed to bad news about all of our financial lives. I am willing to bet (and I do not gamble) that if the collective news media took my suggestion of taking positive spins on everything for a week, the economy would rebound and we would all be ok. BUT, why would they do that? Will it sell? Will they lose their advertisers? Of course it will sell, of course they would not lose advertisers. They would probably gain some.

Remember the last time we had economic difficulty? The last bad stretch we went through was the late 80's with the Savings & Loan debacle. The news media killed real estate then and never gave real estate any credit. You destroyed us (the real estate industry) then and destroyed us now with what was allowed by the government to happen and the news media. It took real estate and the economy a long time to come back. The media helped us along again in the late 90's and early part of this century when they said the economy and the upswing in the real estate market couldn't last. Way to go media!

Real estate drives every economy. When the real estate market is good, so is everything else. When something is good, the media kills it and is the doomsayer by predicting problems with no basis. It is absolutely not all the fault of the media. They haven't caused greed that has occurred and driven problems throughout the world, they just stoked the fire. We are living the Gordon Gecko reality and what it has done to us. Here, the media actually did some good, but the regulators-our politicians, sat on their collective butts and reaped the benefits and got fat along with the pompous corporate leaders. It turns out they were only the leaders of how much money they could take as bonuses. Think about it: A top executive gets fired and walks away with millions. This isn't a game show with departing gifts instead of what is behind door number one. They got not only what was behind the door, but they got the door for their new house too!


The Bailout is helping everything but the little guy. The media is so excited about being negative on the corporate engines and has forced the hand of the fat cows in Washington to bail them out. Now a bailout of the auto industry. Who's going to bail me out? Who is going to bail out the small business man. Well, they did it for AIG, they are going to do it for GM, but will they come all of the way down the food chain? Earlier I said it was a wonder that suicides haven't increased, but what has increased are the commercials on TV about depression medication.
We don't need medication, we need all of the Howard Beales of the world to stand up, open the window and scream: "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore." (from the movie Network)

It all starts with real estate. Stop helping out these fat slobs in the corporate world and start helping the home owner who was told he could afford a house when he really couldn't and now his life is crumbling around him. Force the banks to take the money and bail out their mortgagors, not line their pockets with some more unregulated funds. By helping out the little guy, you help out the economy. The heck with the desired trickle down affect. It's now time for the trickle up affect. Help the little guy. He in turn is able to spend more money on food, clothing and extras. Then the retailer does better and so on and so on. How about that CNN?

Let's face it, the only place we can get real news is on "Weekend Update" on Saturday nights. If you want to hear someone tell it like it is, go to www.TheKidFromBrooklyn.com.

No media outlet has the guts to make a difference, just help be the cause of the difference. If you say I am wrong, let's go back a couple of years and think about that starring couple of Bill and Monica. Parents during those years had to fight with their teenagers that oral sex wasn't sex. The kids said it was ok because the leader of the free world said so after he got caught with his pants down, literally. The media so loved Clinton that not only did they get him elected, they also kept him in office and say that he is a great man. A great orator yes, a man? You be the judge.
As I digress.

As I said in an earlier blog, the best investment is real estate. As a great man (my father) once said, "Land, they aint makin any more of it" It all starts with real estate.

Being an order taker in Northern New Jersey in the residential real estate world is over. For the past several years, if you had a real estate license, you could make money. Work was a 4 letter word and most agents didn't like that 4 letter word.
More agents are getting out of the business than are getting in. This should be a relief for the agents that actually work and worked hard to get where they got. These hard workers are still working hard and are still making the money they were making before. They are making the money they were making before because they took nothing for granted and kept working their job. The agents that are slow now have stated that business is slow and that they are going to wait for the market to come back.. Simply put: the workers are earning the order takers are yearning.

A part of our training and support regimen at CENTURY 21 Eudan Realty is to set a goal, write it down and make a plan. What a concept. This is what the business world calls a business plan.

I have have spoken with many agents in the past year. Before I meet with them, I review as much of their statistics, their listings and how they market on the whole, as possible. At our meeting, we discuss production in a round about way. We then discuss what they are doing as far as prospecting. Prospecting can be anything from keeping in touch with past customers to anything one can imagine.
The workers say they are doing all of the things they did before. In other words, what made them successful they continue to do. AND they are maintaining their level of success. The order takers aren't doing anything that they may have done before and their transactions have dipped to an all time low or is non-existent.
For workers, this is the best time to be in real estate. Those considering this as a career, NOW is the time. We have a method of getting new agents going quickly as well as a method to restart that order taker and make them profitable.
A great time to get back to basics and be a real estate professional in Bergen County, New Jersey.