Here is a photo of one of our banners in the foyer of the Convention Center in New Orleans.  We have come here to introduce a whole new set of systems and tools for our agents and franchise owners that will take them to the front of the line in lead generation, customer service, and internet search.  Come by our booth and check it out!

During the past 5 months, I have been co-authoring a new book with Michael E. Gerber and Glenn Melton.  It will be published in March, and we are announcing it this week at the NAR Convention in New Orleans.  Here is a short video that we are using at the convention to promote it and our company.

As mentioned in the post before this one, we have introduced SmartSigns to the real estate industry.  Realty Executives has created the Tag Manager to easily control and manage all of your tags on your signs and print.  In my prior post there was a sample of the new tags (new type of bar code from Microsoft).  If you went to the website I mentioned and downloaded the tag reader software on your phone, you probably already watched the video from that tag.  If you did not do that, here is the video you would see.

Have you been seeing these new "bar codes" recently in magazines or movie theatres?  This is a new Microsoft product that our company is now using.  We call them SmartTags and you can start "tagging" them with your smartphone (iPhone, BlackBerry, Droid, etc) by downloading the free app to read them.  Go to http://gettag.mobi on your phone.  Once the app is downloaded, try tagging this code, and see what happens! You will see a video of me telling you more about how we are using them in our real estate business.

Here is a link to a video of me singing my new song: "The Short Sale, Foreclosure Blues"  I sang this at our Executive Event in Phoenix on Friday June 11th.  I think we may have a new "mantra" in the last verse!

I am just leaving the RIS Media Leadership conference in Rye, NY.  It was the first one I have attended, but I have been to many real estate conferences before.  This was refreshing in that the presenters and the attendees all just rolled up their sleeves and got down to business, with no BS.  I have been to too many of these where the presenters think they are there to do "infomercials" about their products or companies.  And you all know what I mean...everyone hates that and sees through it.  

My compliments to John Featherston and Allan Dalton for making sure people took the high-road and shared their information professionally

This really freaked me out the other day...I was on Facebook and up popped a photo of a "friend" and it said "Reconnect with him" under his photo.  This is a normal occurance on Facebook, except the person whose photo popped up happened to have died several weeks earlier.  It was a little disturbing.  People have told me to just "unfriend" him so this doesn't happen anymore, but it raised the question about how does one's relatives manage a deceased person's social media accounts after they pass away.

Anyone else ever experience anything like this?  How did the family manage the situation?

While visiting some of our franchises in California a couple of weeks ago, it struck me that our owners come from many different parts of the world.  I am proud that our company has such diversity, even just in one state!  Here is a list of countries from which some of our California Broker/Owners come:

Germany, England, Armenia, Costa Rica, Poland, Italy, Pakistan, India, Chile, Panama, Albania and Mexico!  

I love learning from each other and discovering how international our company is, even within one state in the U.S!

According to a recent study by Cornell University, consumers think "precise" numbers are smaller than ones that end in zeros!  People in the study consistently judged $510,000 to be higher than $511,534, and they saw $400,000 as "considerably" higher than $401,298. 

Many prices of products on shelves and in the MLS have prices that end in 99.  (Instead of a product being priced at $3.00, retailers price it at $2.99 because it is perceived as in the $2 range instead of the $3 range.  Many houses are priced at $499,000, instead of $500,000, for the same reason.)  Researchers have known about this "nine" effect for more than 80 years.

But you may want to advise your sellers to stop pricing homes ending in "000" and start pricing them with "precise" numbers like "$452,768."  The researchers studied thousands of real estate transactions in Florida and New York where houses sold for less than the asking price.  The houses originally priced with "precise" amounts sold for almost 1% more than those priced ending in "000."

This was also recently reported in SmartMoney by Jack Hough.

I just returned from a trip to Paris and Barcelona.  I was truly amazed at the polarity of prices in big cities like that.  One example of the high side: 135 square meter apartment in Paris = 1,750,000 Euro.  That is the same as 1453 square feet at $2,367,235 for a cost per square foot of $1629.  It then occurred to me that this is not that different than some apartments in New York or Chicago or San Francisco.  The problem in any large city is the affordable housing for the average people who work at all sorts of jobs around cities like those.  As I traveled further out of Paris and Barcelona, I saw the other end of the spectrum - the run-down, non-descript, high-rise tenement buildings that are covered with graffiti.  Again, not that much different than some of our US cities.  I did not find out the prices of these, but surely they would reflect the same differential as the prices of such in NY, Chicago or SF.

Also, the price of premium gasoline in Barcelona was 1.25 Euro per liter...that is $4.74 per gallon...I am proud and lucky to live where I do!