Ever notice how some Active Rain blogs look nice with the text away from the pictures while others seem to have the text all jammed up against the picture?
Believe it or not, it's easy to make you pictures stand out by keeping the text away!
Here's how to do it.
First, start typing your blog.
Step Two: SAVE your work!
When you're done, SAVE your work using the "Draft" setting in the visibility setting. This way you won't loose all that excellent hard work you put into your blog.
Step Three: Upload your picture.
You should already know how to do this. Just click the tree looking button on the menu and a window will open. Once the window is open, click on the red, white and blueish button as shown below. This will then open another window which will include a browse button. Clicking on the browse button will take you to your computer where you can locate and upload your chosen picture.
Step Four: Name the picture and adjust the settings.
This is where the magic happens. When your picture is uploaded, you should name it in both boxes. And here's a cool trick. Name your picture something like, "Abacus by Bob Haywood" (use your own name!). That way whenever someone sees that picture in their Google search results, it will be under your name! Do this enough times and you'll have pictures all over the Internet with your name attached to them. Be sure you are not using copyrighted pictures!
Now that you have named your picture, use your mouse and click on the "Appearance" tab in the insert image window. It should look like this.
To make the text stay away from the picture put a 2 or a 3 in both the vertical space and horizontal space border boxes. IMPORTANT NOTE: Make sure you click on the next box down after you put the number in. This makes the program take the number. I click on the border box after I put the number in the Horizontal Space box just to be sure.
I do not put a number in the border because I don't use borders around my pictures. You can experiment with this to determine your own preferences.
Once you're done, click on the Insert tab and your picture will pop into your blog with your border settings. You can then move it left, right or to the center using the settings on the Entry tab of your blog.
This should put a nice space between your picture and your text. Repeat the above steps for each picture you want to put into your blog.
Finally, SAVE your work as Public or Members Only.
Be sure to put in your tags and choose where to post your blog and you should be good to go!
I decided to take a stab at creating some social media icons. I like the bottle caps that Jeremy and Bob have been using but wanted to do something more specific to Active Rain. So without further ado here they are:
You can link this as a blog subscription button or to your active rain profile. It's pretty much universal.
Here's one for Facebook. You can use it to link to your profile or fan pages.
Here's a Flickr icon for you.
Linkedin
For you RSS feed.
Twitter
YouTube
If there are any I missed I'll take requests. Everyone is welcome to use them and since I'm a firm believer in there's no such thing as a free lunch, all I ask in return is for you to leave me a comment so I can check them out on your blogs.
I received an email from NAR asking us to send a request to our Senator about extending the 8,000 tax credit for the first time home buyers. I was shocked today, when I went to the mail box and found this letter. I never expected to get something in writing from Lindsey Graham.
I am very impressed with the quick acknowledgement of our concerns and the personal contact that his office has made.
What do Real Estate Agents and Sea Gulls have in Common?
The Sea Gull can still make her deposit on the Mercedes!
Thought this might give you a chuckle today. I tried to post it from the office this morning, but the server went sideways and then down and I had to leave for outside appointments. Hope all of you have a great weekend!
Sandy Childs | Keller Williams | sandychilds@hotmail.com | 864-921-1523
821 Thistle Court, Boiling Springs, SC
Wow what a garage / workshop! 22 x 24 with electricity & a yard door. Nice, well kept yard with a deck for grilling. Nice mature shade trees.
3BR/2BA Single Family House
offered at $119,900
Year Built
2001
Sq Footage
1,297
Bedrooms
3
Bathrooms
2 full, 0 partial
Floors
2
Parking
2 Car garage
Lot Size
0.22 acres
HOA/Maint
$25 per month
DESCRIPTION
This 3 bedroom 2 full bath home is very well kept and is in move in condition. The front porch is perfect for sitting in rocking chairs and the deck is perfect for entertaining. Spartanburg County District 2 schools. This home is located in the Boiling Springs community and is less than 2 miles from I-85.
see additional photos below
PROPERTY FEATURES
- Central A/C
- Central heat
- Fireplace
- Walk-in closet
- Family room
- Breakfast nook
- Dishwasher
- Stove/Oven
- Attic
- Laundry area - inside
- Balcony, Deck, or Patio
- Yard
COMMUNITY FEATURES
- Swimming pool(s)
OTHER SPECIAL FEATURES
- Subivision offers fenced parking area for boats and utility trailers.
Was doing my regular morning coffee, Active Rain and answering email. Flipped back to my home page and there it was ~ 503 blog posts. OMG I have written over 500 blog posts in less than one year and also accumulated over 150,000 points.
Some of my first posts were really sad and some were really bad. I would like to thank Active Rain for making me a better blogger, not that I'm that great now, but much better than before.
This site has really helped me in this down market. It helps to read blogs from all over the country and to hear what other agents are struggling with and to also hear about their success and to share tips and tools of the trade.
Over the course of my career, I have been the bearer of tough news for my listing clients many times. I don't ever relish the thought of sharing bad news with anyone, but I must admit that my skills in this area have improved dramatically with experience.
I have a few tips to share that might help you if you are faced with delivering undesirable news to your own clients.
1. Just say it. Sometimes, it's best to just spit it out, then deal with the explanation. If you're at a listing appointment, and you know that the home is worth substantially less than they were hoping for, you don't have anything to gain by beating around the bush. Get it out on the table. In fact, it might just save you some time if they are unwilling to listen to the facts, because you can make a quicker exit.
2. You might consider prefacing your statement with, "I fully realize that this is not what you were hoping to hear", or something similar. It may or may not soften the blow very much, but at least you tried, right?
3. If they question your valuation of their home, tell them that you are forced to look at things as an appraiser would. I have said things like this, "I think your home shows really well, and you have a ton of nice upgrades. I think we could actually find a buyer that will pay the price you want, but I really don't think it will appraise, then you have a new set of issues to deal with."
4. Another good quote (feel free to steal it from me): "You might get an agent to agree to list the home for that price, but it won't change the market value. Don't ever choose an agent based exclusively on the price."
I hope that this is helpful for you. I am known with my past clients as being direct and honest, without being blunt. There is a fine art to communicating effectively. Hopefully, these tips will give you a leg up on your competition.
We control the limitations that we encounter and the levels of success that we achieve.
What we think about is the foundation of our success or limitations. What we think about, is what we will dwell on until it becomes a dominating thought.
Our dominating thoughts form the basis for our self-expectations.
Our self-expectations will set our internal guidance system. The level of success that we accomplish or the limitations we experience are formed in our self-expectations.
We become what we think we are, set your expectations high.
®2009, Lou Ludwig, Sales and Management Consultant Executive Coach, Speaker, Trainer and Author
First, please watch this YouTube video by Epipheo Studio explaining why Google Wave will revolutionize email communication. Then see how it will change online real estate transactions and sales cycles for the better, by making it integrated, manageable and streamlined.
Most of what I write below is based on my expectation of the exact features of Google Wave without actually having access to it and to the API sandbox (Google - please send us an invite already, will you?)
As you can see from the video above, Google Wave improves email communication by solving the mess, that the back-and-forth, multi-participant email communication creates. Any process (business or other) that has a relatively long timespan and involves many participants are a pain to conduct via email. That applies to the management of a web design project as described in the video above, planning a wedding or a corporate event, and true for real estate transactions as well. Since real estate transactions and the real estate business cycles are 1) lengthy by nature and 2) they involve many stakeholders besides you and your client (inspectors, assistants, insurance folks, lawyers, interior designers, vendors etc.), it is very well suited for improvements by the Google Wave platform.
What is Google Wave?
At its basic level it is:
A communication platform, that combines different features and benefits of
email
threaded discussions
media-independent sharing (any digital object - text, video, PDF etc. can be attached to the Wave)
real-time chats
open, standard extendability
If we dig deeper into its capabilities, it will clearly show that the sum of all these things is bigger than what the individual features by themselves can deliver:
The real estate business cycle consists of 4 major components:
Self marketing and prospecting
Servicing active clients Listing marketing (etc) for sellers and home finding (search, showing etc.) for buyers
Even though, during the last decade or two, most of these processes became computer aided and many of them went online, integration of individual business processes are still cumbersome if at all doable.
Google Wave has the potential to change this. You will be able to set up a Wave, invite all participants to communicate in one communication channel, attach all information to one thread and you and your clients will be able to track progress, communicate decision points all within one environment.
Let's talk about Extendability:
I believe, that Google Wave will become an overnight success for many reasons, but the emphasize on extendability can not be stressed enough. Theoretically, you could imagine that one software vendor could create a service for you that supports the whole real estate business cycle via their proprietary system, but in practice a system like this can be prohibitively expensive and always lacking and slow to adopt to new requirements. Alternatively, you could ask the many vendors supporting your individual business processes to pick up the phone and start talking to each other and integrate their systems (IDX and eDoc and marketing tools and lead management and CRM etc.) but quite frankly, the chance of this happening is close to zero. The cost and risk is too high for the vendors and their interests overlap and collide. This is where Google Wave extendability comes to the picture. Wave is designed from the ground up to be a platform that provides the infrastructure for 3rd party vendors to add their own custom functionality to it. It is a centralized standard that vendors will adapt and you will be able to replace an under performing vendor by simply signing up with a competing one WITHOUT jeopardizing your overall service.
Via the Google Wave's robots and gadgets specification, software vendors like us at RealBird and Zillow, Cyberhomes, Altos Research, Trulia and many others will be able to create extensions that interact with your Waves and enhance them with added functionality and information.
The easiest way to imagine how a Google Wave application will look like is to take all the scenarios where you or your visitors or your clients initiate an email conversation.Replace the email communication with Wave and imagine how much better the whole process will be when other stakeholders and 3rd party information can be attached to the conversation thread.
For example, take a RealBird single property website. Some prospective buyer finds it through syndication or search engine marketing and is interested enough to share it with his or her spouse. Currently they send an email using the built-in email tool. We will provide an option for them to not only send an email but create a Google Wave - which eventually invites the spouse to join the conversation via email. They start their discussion about the property within the Wave. Let's say they decide that they want to see this property, Currently, they would send you another email, a step which starts breaking down the communication process to unconnected channels. With Google Wave, they will invite you to join the existing Wave as a participant. With the built-in permission system, they will be able to add you to the conversation without disclosing what they talked about before. Once you joined the Wave, you will be able to add calender events and todos to the conversation (maybe using a 3rd party Wave extension gadget) and attach more information such a disclosures, floorplans and any other info that you think will enhance the process. Let's say, your prospective buyers like the property and for the sake of argument, let's say they have their own buyer's agent already. At this point - or maybe earlier - they invite her to join the Wave. Again, with appropriate permission control. Eventually, they make up their mind and make an offer. Let's say the offer is accepted. From this point the Wave will turn from a prospecting channel into managing the closing process. You will be able to add new 3rd party "robots", maybe one from DocuSign or other eDoc providers, and you will invite title and escrow people etc. You get the point: the Wave - with it's core platform and with its 3rd party applications - will help you cross the current boundaries and disintegration points of the business process, melting them into one, easy to manage integrated environment.
This is just an example process, simplified for the sake of the example, but I think it's good enough to show the power of Google Wave to manage business processes. This particular one shows an example from the buyer's perspective, how they can add stakeholders to the process, but you can take other processes and apply the same exercise with you being the "chairman" of the thread. Or imagine a Wave for a home search, with RealBird Property Search "robots" participating and posting matching listings into the Wave. Or conducting office collaborations. Or open house marketing. Only the imagination is the limit.
Google, if you are reading this post, please send us an invite already, we can't wait to start developing Wave robots and integration points for RealBird. Will you? Thanks.
Lori Bowers posted a blog about real estate agents being safe and wanted to know what other agents do to stay safe. My comments have turned into this blog post. Here are some of the things that we do at our Keller Williams office in Spartanburg, South Carolina:
The first thing we try to do is have the prospect to meet us at the office.
We always make sure that someone knows where we are going.
We have a code word in case things should go bad.
We try to go in pairs.
Try to arrive after the prospect, park behind them and call the office or a buddy with the make, model and tag number of the car, you can fumble around with your papers while you are doing this.
If possible, have the seller to hang around.
Always let the prospect walk infront of you ~ never behind you.
Always wear shoes that you could run in ~ if you have to.
Always carry a large flashlight with you, I recommend the black Maglight. If necessary you could hit an attacked with it ~ then run like heck!
Never wear flashy jewelry or anything around your neck that could be used to strangle you.
Refuse to show the house.
When you are doing an Open House only have one door unlocked. Try to keep up with how many people are in the house, especially of the house is more than one level.
Always listen to your inner voice ~ if something does not feel right ~ make an excuse and get out. Trust your instincts.
Hope this helps, Hopefully none of us will never have anything bad or scary happen to us ~ however ~ it always pays to be prepared.
Let me clarify that this is only when you have a situation where you are called upon to meet a potential buyer, that you have never met before, at a house. This is especially important if the house is vacant.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
You can link this as a blog subscription button or to your active rain profile. It's pretty much universal.
Here's one for Facebook. You can use it to link to your profile or fan pages.
-- Zoltan 
;)
;)
