Resourceful People in a "Dog eat Dog" World

To play on the titles of my last two blogs, it seems to be a "dog eat dog" world out there. We have prohibitive gasoline and oil costs that won't go away. Jobs are being outsourced and mortgages are killing homeowners. Prices of food and other necessities are escalating. There are wars and rumors of more wars. Major banks are in serious trouble. Signs of recession are strong in Alcona County, Michigan as well as elsewhere. Foreclosures have become one of the real estate agent's greatest competitions. When will it end? What can we do about it all? I say, let's join forces and ideas to become proactive and positive.

As a real estate sales associate as well as a Realtourvision dealer, I suggest that it is more important than ever to utilize all the tools we have and use them well. Janice Voelker of Virtualeyes360 points out that while we can't do much about some of the choices people make that put them at the mercy of foreclosure we can find the other side of the coin and work it as best we can. Check out what she has to say about working with the buyer and generating rental properties.

Being a Realtourvision dealer as well as a real estate sales associate, I look at the Virtual Tour as a tool for creating an inexpensive marketing answer here in small town Harrisville, MI. Yes, inexpensive. Where else can you get ONE FULL YEAR of advertising for yourself and your client while providing him with a virtual open house, for under $100.00?

Of course, getting that house ready to be photographed is an issue on occasion. Trish Edmonds of Ad Vantage Virtual Tours talks about some proactive things she does before the tour to avoid those problems. I would add that sometimes I send a link to the prospective client for a Key Solutions 360° tour I recently completed so they can get the feel for what we photograph and what to expect. Frankly, I have not run into many problems of people being unprepared.

As I alluded to in the opening paragraph, we are a resourceful people. Some dogs have indeed eaten dogs but that is not the usual pattern. More often, dogs band together to forage and share-even though they do exhibit a pecking order. We are a higher species and I have every faith that if we band together to share ideas, with ingenuity and a little effort we can, not only survive, but we can even expand and grow.

One of the areas of I would like to get ideas about is the issue of foreclosures and how we can better guide our buyers. I would like to be able to guide our buyers to purchase homes of people in need before they fall into foreclosure rather than buying the agony and sadness of an already foreclosed property. Somehow, I sense that buying someone's grief might backfire in the long run. Are there any ideas out there?