Rick Geha and myself will be hosting a 1 hour class on how to obtain REO's, it is at the Stockton Keller Williams office. It is free to attend. The class will go from 1 until 2, unless there are a lot of questions. The Keller Williams office is on Deer Park Circle just off of I-5 on the March Lane Exit.

See you all tomorrow!

Nick

            The perils of a Realtor in 2008 have already gotten off to a great start. In one of the many hats I wear as a Realtor is the hat of foreclosure specialist for Countrywide Home Loans. I do not fully understand why the bank does some of the things that they do. Case in point:

            We have a property located in Modesto that is a 1500 square foot, 3 bedroom, 2 bath home built in the 1950's. It has original hard wood floors, new roof, new dual pane windows, but the kitchen and bathrooms are outdated. The piece de resistance is the home sits on over an acre in the city, very hard to find.

            The bank lost their shirt of this foreclosure and I empathize with them, so when they said list it a $500,000, I did. Even though I told them the property was worth $380,000; that might seem like sticker shock to some, and a real bargain to others depending on where you live.

            Every 2 weeks or so they lowered the price and lowered the price till last week we were at $399,000 and it had a chance to sell, we were about to get an offer sight unseen from Los Angeles when in their infinite wisdom they dropped the price to $317,900, which is a deal, the agent from Los Angeles rescinded their original offer and wrote a new one at $300,000.

            One stressful weekend later we are sitting on 3 offers with more sure to come. They are giving this property away, and I for one just do not understand why Countrywide as a bank does this?

 I don't know if many of you read the CAR bulletin about issues we face, but I hope most got to see the judgement that was placed yesterday about the Home Equity Purchase Agreement.

For those of you in states not as sue happy as California, we have a specific contract which is to be used when a noticed of default has been recorded against a property. This contract, also know as, the home equity purchase agreement requires that the agent representing the buyer is insured and bonded for twice the value of the property.

The judgement further acclimated why we as agents need to stay on top of all things legal in our business. The seller decided to sue to get his property back because the wrong contract was used and the courts ruled in his favor, and the buyer lost out on his investment purchase. The buyer has since appealed the decision and is trying to get the home back, but we all know in the end the agents and brokers are going to foot the bill for all involved, like we usually do.

I just thought we would all like to know that if you are working with buyers that are trying to purchase a short sale or home in which and NOD has been filed, make sure the you cross your T's and dot your i's.

    I am sure many of you have read Steven Covey's 7 Habits, and well it is a great book with many great "habits" to live by. I am doing a refresher course on habits that we should all continue to embody throughout our lives.

   I decided to purchase the audio version from audible.com, with a new forward by Steven Covey himself. The book is not meant for real estate, but wasn't I amazed at how much of just his forward called out our entire profession.

   The part that I got from it most was about negotiations, in it he said you hammer on each other and try and meet in the middle, where both sides feel like they lost, or at lest one feels real taken advantage of. Doesn't that sound familiar? He suggested instead that you (the negotiator) coming up with creative ways where both parties feel like they won in the end.

   I just thought it was refreshing to hear that again, and I hope many of you can get a sample of that introduction, very powerful in this "price improving" market.

    I am sure many of you have read Steven Covey's 7 Habits, and well it is a great book with many great "habits" to live by. I am doing a refresher course on habits that we should all continue to embody throughout our lives.

   I decided to purchase the audio version from audible.com, with a new forward by Steven Covey himself. The book is not meant for real estate, but wasn't I amazed at how much of just his forward called out our entire profession.

   The part that I got from it most was about negotiations, in it he said you hammer on each other and try and meet in the middle, where both sides feel like they lost, or at lest one feels real taken advantage of. Doesn't that sound familiar? He suggested instead that you (the negotiator) coming up with creative ways where both parties feel like they won in the end.

   I just thought it was refreshing to hear that again, and I hope many of you can get a sample of that introduction, very powerful in this "price improving" market.

                                                         In a very woe is me Edgar Allen Poe way, I find it hard to believe what is taking place in the local California Market. For those of you who have not heard yet, the title company with the largest market share in Northern California have shut their doors, 2 weeks before Christmas and in the midst of the holiday season. Part of the problem could be they have bounced checks to their landlords for the last 3 months!

             The reason I find this very hard to believe is quite frankly I thought people had business sense, but I am sadly mistaken. In the heyday of quick sales and refinancing every weekend, Alliance title went and purchased all escrow officers that they could, giving huge signing bonuses and raising their fees in turn, in hopes that all agents alike would flock our business there. I for one did not, because their fees were higher. The writing had been on the wall for a while that this was coming, but it has left us in bad shape.

           Some of us are still doing business and thriving, but we are left with few choices on who to work with, especially on REO's and some short sales. I just want to take this moment and thank Chicago Title, located next door to us, for at least being honest a year ago and telling us they were cutting back so they could survive, and not lie and act like they were increasing in a "bad market."

It is a 5 minute video, I know the article below is a little long, I just would like for you to read it! Thank You everybody who has shown support! 

             This is the story of how my wife and I met, which is a very "WWII-esque" story. We met through letters while I was deployed overseas fighting for our country. She is a 3 time cancer survivor, and I am a 2 time combat veteran, this is our story below and our wedding video above. I hope everyone enjoys it.

By Jeff Jardine

On what promises to be a warm and spectacular day in July, Kristen Taylor and Nick Cameron will say their "I do's" outdoors at a hotel in Lodi.

She'll walk up the aisle to a flower-covered archway where Cameron and the minister await.

It's a moment that should have occurred 365 days earlier or, if insurgents in Iraq had had better aim, never at all.

Because even though Taylor and Cameron aren't yet married, they've already endured enough fear, setbacks, heartbreak and tensions together to last a lifetime. But nothing has dampened their love for each other or their enthusiasm for their future.

They've coped with the death of his brother, who was in the Marines. And Nick Cameron saw death and destruction while serving tours in Afghanistan and Iraq.

She is fighting melanoma, which began with a single mole and has returned twice. She's had two surgeries, including one that caused the couple to postpone their scheduled July 2006 wedding one year.

They waded through Cameron's readjustment to civilian life after he mustered out of the Army in 2004.

Through it all, they discovered they were meant to meet, to date, to fall in love and to be married - life's obstacles be damned.

Here's their story: Taylor graduated from Johansen High in 1999, the same year Nick Cameron graduated from Beyer. Both participated in speech competitions, but never against each other.

Cameron attended California State University, Monterey Bay, dropped out after his freshman year, and enlisted in the Army.

Taylor went on to Chico State and began working toward her teaching credential. She taught at Modesto High before joining Johansen's staff, where her mother, Yvonne Taylor, and Cameron's mom, Marcia Cameron, teach.

In October 2001, 22-year-old Marine Cpl. Jeremy Cameron - Marcia's son and Nick's brother - was killed in a training exercise at Camp Pendleton, near San Diego. Taylor accompanied her mother to Jeremy's funeral in Modesto.

As the only surviving son, Nick Cameron said, he was given the option of leaving the Army ahead of schedule.

"But I wanted to finish (his commitment), to do what's right," he said.

A few months later, he shipped out to Afghanistan, serving with Bravo Company in the 3rd Battalion, 505th Infantry Regiment. When he returned in September 2003, his mother staged a welcome-home party. She took the week off to prepare. Taylor, now doing her student teaching, substituted that week.

Marcia Cameron invited her and others in the English department to the party, and that is where Taylor formally met Nick Cameron.

"I was there for maybe 10 minutes because I had a blind date," she said. "But I still remember what he was wearing: a 'Hard Rock Cafe, Bagram, Afghanistan' shirt. It was a joke."

Cameron returned to his base at Fort Bragg, N.C., when his leave ended and learned from watching TV that his unit would soon head to Iraq.

At Marcia Cameron's request, Taylor began writing letters to Cameron.

"I started writing once a week, then twice a week," she said. "Just mundane things that happened. I didn't want to write anything heavy, considering what he was going through over there."

She was hired to teach freshman English at Modesto High and required each of her students to write a 'Dear Soldier' letter.

"I passed them out to soldiers who didn't get much mail," Cameron said.

Military mail being what it is, he'd get a stack of a dozen letters at a time. And while he frequently e-mailed or called his parents, he never wrote letters.

"I had no time," he said.

Then, he wrote one.

"One letter the entire time, and it was to me," said Taylor, who now teaches at Johansen. "I was dating a guy at the time, and I broke it off. It affected me. I concluded there might be something here."

On his final day in Iraq, though, Cameron's unit came upon an explosive device in the road. They stopped to check it out, and found themselves under mortar attack.

"I remember thinking, 'We've made it through all of this, and now we're gonna die,'" he said "That didn't happen, obviously."

He returned to Modesto on Memorial Day 2004, and Taylor invited him to speak to her classes.

For their first date, he took her to Papapavlo's Mediterranean restaurant in Modesto.

"It turned into a five-hour lunch," Taylor said.

They discovered his Beyer High debate team partner, Amanda Heiner, had been Taylor's best friend growing up. They had other common friends as well.

"We had all these connections," she said.

Learning he's a die-hard Giants fan, she bought him tickets to a game at AT&T Park. She didn't know his parents were season ticket holders, but he played the role of the good soldier.

"I didn't say anything that my parents' seats were better than hers were," Cameron said.

They now were officially dating. Cameron, who became a real estate salesman, soon suggested they buy a home together, and it was clear they were headed toward an engagement. She agreed on the condition that she had a ring on her finger within six months, and he came through as promised. He proposed at Papapavlo's, where they had their first date, and they planned a July 2, 2006, wedding.

Not so fast.

Back in May 2002, while getting ready to graduate from Chico State, Taylor noticed that a mole on her left leg had started to change. She went to a doctor, who wanted her to see a dermatologist. But her insurer at the time considered it cosmetic and refused to pay to have it removed, she said. So the other doctor took it off at the surface and, though it was malignant, told her she had a 1 percent chance of having it return.

Four years later, she noticed a lump on her hip. Doctors at the University of California at San Francisco Medical Center removed 28 lymph nodes from her left hip and groin. Only one was cancerous, but they started her on chemotherapy.

Her father, retired Modesto police detective Ray Taylor, went to every appointment with her. The cancer tested Cameron, who gave her shots in her stomach.

"I always felt the need to do more," he said. "I didn't know what to do."

He felt he needed to be stoic and strong, as his military training dictated.

"I tried to be positive reinforcement," he said. "I never wanted to cry. I wanted to be strong for her."

She needed him to be less Army and more fiancé.

"We had some tense moments," Taylor said. "I needed to talk about my mortality. If I did, I could get it out."

The cancer returned seven months later, this time in her spleen. Because the body can live without the spleen, she wasn't considered terminal. So she had it removed in the fall of 2006 and has been cancer-free since.

There are caveats: She's still considered a Stage IV melanoma patient. And she's gone from having a 1 percent chance of having the cancer again - as was the case after having the first mole removed - to an 80 percent chance it will return at some point in life.

"I'm OK with it," Taylor said. "I've accepted that it's part of my life.

She'll need to go five years without a recurrence to be considered in remission, and if the disease returns, she won't be able to have children.

Yet these two young people forge ahead smiling, grateful to have each other.

Yes, they should have gotten married a year earlier than their new July 1 date. But considering what they've endured in such a short time together, they'll take it.

            Have you heard the term, practice makes perfect? Well, I think we all have, but this cliché is flawed. Practice does not make perfect, it makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect. We stress in our business to do the right thing all the time, however, many of us practice doing the wrong thing and it makes it permanent.

            If it is something that we enjoy we are able to easily institute it in our daily lives, like a trip to Starbucks, eating McDonald's, doing anything that brings personal satisfaction for a couple of moments. On the other hand, talking on the phone (cold calls), door knocking, open houses, FSBO's, pop-by's, it is real hard for us to get into the habit of doing it everyday, and therefore makes it hard to get great at it. Those out there with systematic plans of action will always come out on top. My last thought of the day is that a system is an artificial skill. So if you are not good on the phone, get a system, stick with it and you will have that skill.

            I made a comment on someone else's blog yesterday about interesting stories you are never told when you join the real estate industry. I thought everyone would appreciate this one.

            I was taught that door knocking in one of Modesto's exclusive neighborhoods, I was taught it is the right thing to do, and in California's crazy market I needed clients, so that is what I did. I ended up listing a million dollar home in my first month, and I promised my sellers I would per-approve all buyers before they walked through the door.

            One month into the listing there has been a lot of interest in the property but no offers, and then I get a call from a woman, let's call her Rosie. Rosie asks me if I can show her the property right then, (I ignored this red flag, blamed it on the market) I told her you have to be pre approved in order to see the home and she said no problem and gave me her financial advisor's number at Merrill Lynch.

            He faxed me a paper that showed she was worth 3 million liquid and had substantial holdings, so she can afford the house. I set up an appointment for that Friday at 5:15pm, I did my due diligence and arrived 15 minutes early to have my sellers leave so I could show the property without interference, but the client had beat me to the punch and was already there, watering flowers?!?!? I asked one of my sellers how long she had been there and they said about 15 minutes, they weren't going to let her inside until I had shown up and they also gave her permission to look around the 1 acre.

            As I went to greet her near the rear of the property I heard a splash in the fenced pool area, when I opened the gate, I proceeded to find a buck naked women in her early 50's going for a little swim, much to my surprise she casually got out of the pool and walked over to me naked slipped her dress back on and asked if I could help zip her up! Much to my amazement I had no idea what to do, I asked her to leave and went back to my office immediately, and completely embarrassed.

            I called her financial officer and he told me she wasn't all there, you think chief, I could have used that information yesterday! I asked a couple people in my office if stuff happened like this often and I got a resounding no, with lots of laughter. I will forever be known at my first office for this experience.

            It just goes to show that in the end we all grow in real estate, and learn from these debacles.

This is a remarkable ranchette in Modesto, CA. Over 15 acres for the entire property included are 3 homes, the main home is over 2400 square feet, 3 bedroom and 3 bathrooms, new granite counters and beautiful cabinets. The second home is a 3 bedroom 1 bath 1100 square feet of harwood floor paradise, with it's own attatched parking and personal backyard. The last is a little 600 square foot bungalow 1 bedroom and 1 bathroom. The property has 10 acres of almonds, over 50 chestnut trees, and 2 squab houses. All is offered at $1,050,000.

For more information check out www.MoveModesto.com