Have you ever heard of a Brokers Price Opinion? If not, you probably will. As the real estate slump deepens, many agents need to supplement their income. For this reason, agents are turning to performing Brokers Price Opinions, or BPO’s.

A BPO is performed to determine the value of a home. It is most commonly performed when a home is in default and the bank would like to know what the current value would be in the event of needing to sell the home if it becomes a REO asset. A BPO will also be completed prior to a home being listed for sale when it's a REO. BPO's are typically completed at the request of a loss mitigation or REO department. Local real estate agents are who most commonly perform a BPO because they are more familiar with their local real estate market

BPO's help lenders determine the value of a home. It provides them with a reliable accurate opinion of a property’s value and what it would sell for instead of an appraisal that will tell the investor what the value may be. The investor will use a local real estate broker to perform a BPO because they are more familiar with the local real estate market. The investor wants to know what they would be able to sell the home for within 90 days. This value may be different then what an appraiser would come up with. Lenders are not in the business of owning real estate and will work with home owners to help them avoid foreclosure but in the event of a foreclosure the lender will want to know what they can sell the home for within a certain period of time.

How can you make money? You must first find these companies – that is not the easiest thing to do. Once you find them, you must sign up with them, usually online. This is time consuming, but then again, anything worthwhile takes time.

Once you are approved by the companies (I have signed up for over 100 companies to ensure a steady stream of work), you will be contacted when the need for a BPO arises in the locations that you have signed up for.

These companies usually pay between $40 - $150, depending on whether you need to drive by or you can do the BPO on the computer. In order to do a BPO, you must be a licensed agent, broker, or appraiser with access to the MLS in your local area.

Even better is the business that you can build while working with these companies. In the past, I have become close with many of the people in some of these companies and they will then refer listings and buyers to you. Additionally, as you work with the lenders in these companies, you build relationships and again, they will refer business to you. This does not happen overnight, but as you work and earn money doing these BPO’s, you are also building your business and creating another revenue stream.

I have compiled a list of BPO companies nationwide. This list is about 10 pages worth of links to companies that are looking for agents to sign up and work with BPO’s. For the time it took to compile this list, I am charging $12.99. If you are interested, please contact me or click on the link below to purchase the list.

Click Here to purchase

In my opinion, Cary North Carolina is the best place on earth to live; then again, I may be prejudice as that is where I live. I relocated to the area from Florida, and in doing research I chose Cary for a number of reasons. Its suburban feel even though it is a larger city, its green spaces, nice subdivisions, great people and schools, and family environment.

Over the years, Cary has gone through growth spurts and slowdowns in growth. These recent slowdowns were as a result of governmental policies that felt that Cary infrastructure could not sustain the 7% growth rate as evidenced by its congestion and lack of school space.

The most recent government is more growth friendly, but at a slower, more sustainable pace, which in my opinion, is healthy for the area.

According to figures released today by the Census bureau, Cary is the 5^th fastest growing largest city in the country.  Town leaders say growth-friendly policies and declining job markets in other parts of the country have helped Cary grow.  Those who have moved to Cary recently from other parts of the country say they were drawn by its suburban feel, its affordable housing and its abundance of pristine parks, golf courses and shopping centers as well as the area's economy and job growth.

With growth comes issues such as traffic, school reassignments, loss of suburban character, among other issues, but unlike previous leadership, the current administration has plans to grow but not as fast as before. But even if Cary continues to swell, most town leaders and residents seem to agree that it remains a great place to live. It has Wake County's lowest tax rate, a plentiful water supply, tidy neighborhoods and amenities such as public pools and greenways

While Cary's growth in comparison with larger cities in the nation is swift, within North Carolina, it is fairly small. Many smaller Wake County cities are growing at much more rapid paces. For example, Rolesville has grown 29% in the same period. Raleigh has placed 13^th on the same list of larger city growth.

Like it or hate it the Triangle area has and continues to be a destination for many across the country and will continue to grow.

Below is a list of the top 10 fastest growing cities in North Carolina as well as a chart of Cary's growth over the past 5 years:

1.   1. Rolesville, pop. 2,242

2. Carolina Shores, pop. 2,312

3. Holly Springs, pop. 19,684

4. Knightdale, pop. 7,397

5. Wake Forest, pop. 25,329

6. Fuquay-Varina, pop. 15,394

7. Fairview, pop. 5,301

8. Mebane, pop. 10,155

9. Stallings, pop. 8,742

10. Huntersville, pop. 42,579

17.  Cary, pop. 121,796

Cary's national rank among fast-growing areas has risen dramatically in the past few years. Here is where it stood among municipalities with more than 100,000 people for the past five years:

2007: 5 (7.3 percent growth)
2006: 8 (5.1 percent growth)
2005: 22 (3.3 percent growth)
2004: 63 (1.4 percent growth)
2003: 43 (1.7 percent growth)

If you live in Wake County and have been waiting to find out what your new tax bill will be, the wait is over. The News and Observer has a great tool to find out estimate what your taxes will be for this coming year. You can figure out what the county taxes are and if you are inside city limits (Cary, Apex, Raleigh, Holly Springs, and all other cities within Wake County, you can find out your total property tax bill. All you need is the web address and your current assessed value. If you have last year’s assessed value (before the revaluation), you can also find out how much of a tax increase you have been hit with (but it is not necessary in order to calculate this year’s estimated tax bill). Due to the concept of revenue neutral, the rate was not actually that bad (5%, or less than 200$). You can find the tool at:

http://www.newsobserver.com/1181/story/1129367.html

Let me know if you have any questions about how to use the tool.

Have you ever heard of a Brokers Price Opinion? If not, you probably will. As the real estate slump deepens, many agents need to supplement their income. For this reason, agents are turning to performing Brokers Price Opinions, or BPO’s.

A BPO is performed to determine the value of a home. It is most commonly performed when a home is in default and the bank would like to know what the current value would be in the event of needing to sell the home if it becomes a REO asset. A BPO will also be completed prior to a home being listed for sale when it's a REO. BPO's are typically completed at the request of a loss mitigation or REO department. Local real estate agents are who most commonly perform a BPO because they are more familiar with their local real estate market

BPO's help lenders determine the value of a home. It provides them with a reliable accurate opinion of a property’s value and what it would sell for instead of an appraisal that will tell the investor what the value may be. The investor will use a local real estate broker to perform a BPO because they are more familiar with the local real estate market. The investor wants to know what they would be able to sell the home for within 90 days. This value may be different then what an appraiser would come up with. Lenders are not in the business of owning real estate and will work with home owners to help them avoid foreclosure but in the event of a foreclosure the lender will want to know what they can sell the home for within a certain period of time.

How can you make money? You must first find these companies – that is not the easiest thing to do. Once you find them, you must sign up with them, usually online. This is time consuming, but then again, anything worthwhile takes time.

Once you are approved by the companies (I have signed up for over 100 companies to ensure a steady stream of work), you will be contacted when the need for a BPO arises in the locations that you have signed up for.

These companies usually pay between $40 - $150, depending on whether you need to drive by or you can do the BPO on the computer. In order to do a BPO, you must be a licensed agent, broker, or appraiser with access to the MLS in your local area.

Even better is the business that you can build while working with these companies. In the past, I have become close with many of the people in some of these companies and they will then refer listings and buyers to you. Additionally, as you work with the lenders in these companies, you build relationships and again, they will refer business to you. This does not happen overnight, but as you work and earn money doing these BPO’s, you are also building your business and creating another revenue stream.

I have compiled a list of BPO companies nationwide. This list is about 10 pages worth of links to companies that are looking for agents to sign up and work with BPO’s. For the time it took to compile this list, I am charging $12.99. If you are interested, please contact me or click on the link below to purchase the list.

Click Here to purchase

There are two types of people in this world. Those who back up their data regularly and those who will backup their data regularly once they have a hard drive failure and lose important data (pictures of their kids, client information, etc).

ALL HARD DRIVES WILL FAIL AT SOME POINT! Did you hear that? Every hard drive will fail, go bad, become corrupt and eventually die. Hard Drives spin 7200 times per minute and get very hot – this inevitably causes them to die over time.  Some go after a year, some last much longer, but you just never know when one my die. 

What happens to your data at that point depends on how (or if) you have been backing up your data. Sometimes, only the boot sectors on a hard drive become corrupt and you can remove the hard drive, put it in another computer and recover valuable data.  This obviously takes some expertise. Sometimes the hard drive is unreadable and gone forever. In this case, sometimes data can be recovered by a data recovery company that takes the hard drive apart, puts the internal disks through some technical process and recovers some or all of the data.  This is VERY expensive – in the 1000’s. 

As an agent I have a ton of valuable client data, ad campaigns, and transaction documents on my computer.  As a parent, I have even more valuable data such as my kid’s documents and pictures and videos. If I were to lose any of this data, life would not be the same.

There are many ways to back up data automatically. The best way is to buy an external hard drive and software that will allow you to set your computer to back up specific files and folders automatically daily, weekly, or at some other interval. I recommend backing up to at least two different sources so that if one back up fails, you have another. This way you can be worry free with regard to losing data.

I am a back up freak. Technology is a hobby for me.  I have 5 computers running in my home as well as a server. All of my data resides on my server so that it can be accessed from any computer in the house. Additionally, critical data such as transaction and client information and family pictures and videos are backed up to hard drives on all 5 computers every night. In addition to this, I manually back up to a special hard drive that is kept in a fireproof and water proof safe.  This may be overkill, but I never worry about losing my data.

There are several online services that charge about 50$ per year to back up your data.  The first backup can take a long time, but as you use files, it is constantly backing them up via the internet. Data is encrypted and the companies claim it can only be read by you, but I am always skeptical when someone else has access to my data.

However you chose to back up your data, BACK IT UP.  Please do not be the type of person who only backs up your data once you lose important data. IF you have any questions, or need to see if you can have data recovered, let me know – I own a company that attempts to recover data at a low level (not expensive).

Well I have written about property taxes in Wake County North Carolina several times this past two months. It seems to be a hot topic.  Because North Carolina revalues property every eight years, and their property taxes are than based on that value, the city and county governments must make sure that they adjust the tax rate so that residents do not get a huge tax increase in a single year. This concept is called revenue neutral.

I am originally from Florida, and there, the tax rate (in South Florida) is roughly 2% of the house value.  They have a strange system that is capped at 3% gain each year if it is your primary resident, but if you move, you start over. My old home doubled in price over a relatively short period of time. So did many houses. For example, a home that was purchased for 260,000 would have yearly taxes of approximately 4500$.  The person who then bout the same house for 400,000 would pay about 8000$ in taxes while a neighbor in the same exact model, who built the home 20 years ago and never moved may only be paying 1200$ in taxes - can you say unfair.

Back to North Carolina, Wake County, and Cary in particular.  Cary determined that they need to reduce their old tax rate of .42 to .33 to be revenue neutral. they then decided that due to growth, then need more money (don't we all), and decided that even though they agreed that .33 was revenue neutral, they were going to change their rate to .37 to make up the shortfall in their proposed budget.  Well several days later, several commissioners decided they had changed their minds about the rate and the town then decided that .33 would be the rate, but would go up over the next several years to account for the growth.  I am all for taxes paying for the growth within a reasonable amount. I would even agree that Cary should go a few cents above the revenue neutral rate to help pay for infrastructure for the growth. One thing that the town does not mention, although I am sure that they must realize it is:  Much of this growth is due to new construction. The land that the new homes are being constructed on was not producing the tax receipts in the same amount that it will be once the homes are constructed, so some of this growth is paying for itself.  What about the revenue from impact fees from this new development?  I won’t even go there, but needless to say, kudos to Cary for doing the right thing.

If you have any questions about the tax rates throughout Wake County, please do not hesitate to contact me.

I do not normally reprint articles from other sources, but I felt that this one hit the subject of frustrated sellers and realtors in a down market right on the head.  It talks about pricing your home right to sell without regard to what has happened in the past, as well as the sellers mindset and frustrations that realtors feel when sellers are not realistic or do not understand pricing and their market.

 Whether you are a seller reading this, or a realtor, this article can help you see the other side of the discussion that is taking place between sellers and realtors. This article was originally printed in the Sun Sentinel which is a South Florida newspaper. The article was written by Paul Owers on June 16^th.  Although I am a Realtor in the Triangle Area of North Carolina,  this article is written with the South Florida audience in mind, and while this is one of the harder hit markets in the country, it can be useful anywhere that there is a declining market and/or a market with glut of homes, which is just about everywhere these days. I have bolded some phrases and ideas that hopefully will resonate with sellers.

Setting the right price for a home sounds simple, but too many sellers aren't doing it.

They insist that their properties are special and holding value, even though the median prices for existing homes have plummeted 26 percent and 24 percent, respectively, in Palm Beach and Broward counties since late 2005.

These stubborn sellers ask for too much money, ignoring the list prices of nearby homes, not to mention their real estate agents' advice. It's a short-sighted strategy, one that ultimately costs tens of thousands of dollars in a depressed housing market like South Florida, agents say.

"The worst thing to be in this market is one of those homes that's been listed for six, eight, 10 months with no consummated deals," said Beverly Rothstein, an agent in Broward and Palm Beach counties. "That's when the vultures come out, and you have to sell the house at a deep discount that you wouldn't have had to take if you had priced it right from the beginning."

Olga and Manuel Delacruz listed their three-bedroom Greenacres home in central Palm Beach County for $199,000 about four months ago. When it didn't sell, they dropped the price twice. Now they're asking $169,999, which is where they probably should have started, their agent, Douglas Rill, said.

The Delacruzes and other owners of lower-priced homes are likely competing with an increasing number of foreclosures. Lenders don't want to hold these properties, so they're slashing prices. Individual sellers must do the same if they have any hope of finding buyers.

"It's a little frustrating," said Olga Delacruz, 47, a security guard. "If we have to lower it one more time, we will."

Many sellers asking too much for their homes now are doing so because they paid inflated prices during the housing boom of 2000 to 2005. Agents cringe when they hear clients say they have to get a certain amount of money out of their properties.

"Your need doesn't change the market value of the house," said Rill of Century 21 America's Choice Realty in West Palm Beach. "Sellers will say, 'Can you at least try it at this price?' I'm happy to try, but it's not going to work."

Because of the glut of properties for sale, even beautiful homes won't attract interest unless buyers perceive value, said television commentator Gerri Willis.

"There's no bigger issue for sellers right now than pricing," said Willis, host of CNN's Open House and author of Home Rich: Increasing the Value of the Biggest Investment of Your Life.

In the book, Willis writes about price break points, which are psychological limits that buyers often set for themselves. She said a buyer may be willing to spend up to $499,000 on a home but will balk at $500,000, even though the $1,000 difference is barely noticeable on a 30-year mortgage.

Buyers prefer to spend at the top end of their price ranges, but they probably won't even visit properties if they're priced above the psychological break points, Willis said.

So a home valued at $310,000 would attract plenty of interest if listed at $299,000, she said. Asking for more than that would exclude buyers whose limit is $300,000.

And while that same home theoretically would draw people willing to spend up to $400,000, they're probably more interested in properties at the top end of the price range.

"The big question I always get from sellers is, 'At what point should I be willing to cut my price?'" Willis said. "But that's the wrong mindset. You've got to go into the market at the right price."

Terry Story can relate. The agent in Palm Beach and Broward counties wanted to list a Boca Raton home last summer for $575,000, but her client held firm at $625,000. Story knew that was too high, even though there weren't a lot of comparable sales in the area to go by.

Meanwhile, a similar house across the street was priced more competitively from the start and sold quickly for $482,500. Story's seller could do nothing but cut his price, finally finding a buyer to pay $460,000 after six frustrating months.

Instead of getting ahead of the price curve and establishing market value in the neighborhood, he was left to react to it. "He chased down the market," said Story of Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate.

Other sellers are more realistic and realize that being able to move quickly is more important than trying to get the highest price.

Virginia Goss first tried to sell her Boca Raton house on her own, but had no luck. So she listed it with Story, who suggested she put it on the market in the low $300,000 range. Although that was much lower than she preferred, Goss listened and immediately sold the home, albeit at a loss.

"It's hard to swallow a loss, but we're moving on," Goss said. "There's value in that."

Is your property overpriced?

Ssellers can use the following guide to determine whether their properties are overpriced:

Buyers don't perceive value if the home gets no showings. The price must come down substantially.

The price is in the ballpark if the home gets a few showings but no second looks. Sellers should still lower the price.

The home is priced right if it's getting steady showings and repeat visitors. Expect an offer.

Have you ever heard of Google Ad Sense? If not, look to the right of this page, underneath where it says Triangle Realtor – Raleigh Durham Real Estate Blog.  That is Google Ad Sense. You sign up with Google, and they give you code to place in any type of website, including this blog that places targeted ads relevant to your website content. When people click, you earn money. You can also place Google Search boxes on your website and earn when people use the search box.

How do you sign up? Just below the ad box to the right on this page is a smaller box that says Get Targeted ads on your site with Google AdSense. Click that and it will take you to a Google sign up page.

There are tons of different type of ads. Links, banners, boxes, text only, image only, text and images in all shapes and sizes. Even ads with embedded videos and you tube video links. The possibilities are endless. They can be as unobtrusive or prevalent as you would like. You can add them to your personal web page, or to this blog. Visit my website – yourtrianglerealtor.com to see how I am using the ads. Currently I only have a search box at the top of each page, but tonight, and over the next several days, as I explore AD Sense, I will be adding more ads, trying to strike a delicate balance of not having my page look like an advertising site. Check back to see what I have done, and make sure to click on the links on the right as each page may have different uses of Ad Sense. Also, if you happen to click on my web page, any feedback would be greatly appreciated. I created it myself and it is still a work in progress.  Happy earning!

UPDATE:  As I see people commenting that they plan to use it, keep in mind that you will sign up today, and it may take a few days for Google to approve your account and then they will email you that your account has been approved. Once that happens, you can literally have your ads up within minutes. If you have any questions on how to create or post and ad on this site or your own, please do not hesitate to contact me.  And if you are signing up for Google Adsense, please use the box to the right below the main Google Ads and just above my listings as I will get credit.  Thanks for reading.