Real Estate Customer Relationship Management - Ways for Agents to Increase Their Business

In 2005, The National Association of Realtors reported that its membership increased by 13 percent over the previous year, reaching 1.2 million. With this many people trying to get a share of the pie, Realtors need to find ways to differentiate themselves and stay ahead of the competition. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can help them do exactly that, and even more.

CRM comes from the observation that developing good relationships with your customers helps you deliver superior service to your clients, thereby helping your business thrive. Developing a CRM-focused business is not especially hard. It starts with basic guiding rules.

In the marketing lingo, the many ways a business interacts with its clients are called points of contact. By developing the quantity and the quality of these points of contact, a real estate agent will gain more customers.

Of all the existing points of contact, the Internet should receive special attention. In just 10 years, the Web has become an essential marketing venue for today's agents. According to the NAR, 77 percent of home buyers used the Internet to search for a home in 2005. When people think about buying a home the first place they go is often the Web. It is therefore a good place for agents to capture consumers' attention and gain their confidence.

However, many agents are still missing the point: they now have their own Web sites because they know people are looking for them, but they haven't quite figured out how to use the Web as a good lead generator. Here are ways agents can improve their online points of contact.

The layout of your site is key to retain surfers. It should be flawless, and the navigation should also be easy.

E-mails are another critical point of contact. Many agents provide their e-mail address on their Web sites, but an article in Realty Times reported that one of home buyers' main complaints about Realtors online is that they don't answer their e-mails in a timely manner. Decide now about a reasonable e-mail reply policy for your business. A 24- or 48-hour reply policy is probably what most people expect. You need to state this reply policy on your Web site and stick to it. People will appreciate it.

Another option is to allow people to schedule a tour directly from your Web site. This option is a great way to get people to meet with you.

Most people start looking for homes on the Internet a few months before they actually make a decision. It is therefore important for a real estate agent to keep in touch with future home buyers. A good way to maintain that contact is to send out a monthly newsletter, which would give the latest information about the town or area. It would also provide future home buyers with the latest listings that meet their criteria. An agent who sends out this kind of newsletters will find that many of these people remember this agent when they are ready to buy.

The key with CRM is to regularly evaluate existing points of contact to fine tune them in order to better serve customers. This in turn will ensure that agents have a successful business.

Content provided by 10x Media. Established in 2003, 10x Media provides innovative online marketing tools.It has expanded its online presence through networks such as Inside Real state, Inside Finances and Grab Real Estate, which contain thousands of pages for city and state specific real estate information across the nation.

Asset and Portfolio Management : How To Say Goodbye To Emotional Investing

Portfolio management is an important part of your life. Maybe more important than you realize. You have an overall portfolio that is made up of everything you own. Within that portfolio is your investment assets that you need to manage in order to reach your financial goals and have a healthy and wealthy egg-nest to enjoy in your golden retirement years.

In order to profit from portfolio management, it is important to start by designing an investment policy statement and keep to it during the course of investing. An investment policy is your guideline? it's a rule of thumb meant to help you or your portfolio manager make the best decisions for you. Sometimes (actually, often!) our emotions cloud our judgment when it comes to investing.

A fairly significant time when emotion clouds our judgment is when our portfolio value is falling. Our knee-jerk reaction is to sell it all and put the money in a hole in the backyard. That happens far too often and was one of the major causes of the Great Depression in 1939 and the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000/2001. Investors are so easily swayed by emotion and what's called "the herd mentality."

An investment policy is designed to help you avoid emotional investing or getting caught up in the herd mentality. It's a statement ? as detailed or as vague as you want ? that outlines what your goals are with your portfolio, what your preferred asset mix is, and the timeline you have to get there.

Here is a sample investment policy statement. Due to space limitations, it is not heavily detailed.

Investment Policy Statement for John Doe

March 14, 2006

Purpose: the purpose of this statement is to provide me with a framework in which to manage my investment portfolio.

1. Account: My account is held at XYZ Discount Brokers. Their number is (800)555-1234. My account number is 123-456-789-123.

2. Investment objectives: My primary goal is growth and the mix I have selected is as follows: a.Growth: 55% b.Income: 25% c.Safety: 20%

3. Assets: My account is a standard account to hold equities, bonds, mutual funds, etc.

4. Current: I am investing a lump sum of $5000 into an equities and mutual fund mix that correlates to the above asset allocation. Each month I will deposit $200 into my account, divided into each of the asset allocations.

5. Goals: I want to have $100,000 within 25 years to enable me to buy a boat and sail around the world.

On this note, I hope that everybody who desires to generate massive profit from portfolio management, to take out a piece of paper and build your investment policy now. And remember to live with it, and I am sure you will find yourself much more rational in your investment decisions !

Stanley Chua is an investment optimizer and has been providing value-adding advisory in international business innovations, financial planning and portfolio management for the past 10 years. Looking to find out more how you can massively profit from managing your personal portfolio ? You can instantly receive a Free ?Portfolio Management and Asset Assessment? E-Course, at => http://www.portfoliomanagementguide.com

Property Management Software

Property management software is a computer program or computer programs that serve to simplify, streamline, and otherwise facilitate the management of property you own or hope to own. The software is equipped with many useful functions to take care of costs, run tasks, oversee labor, and other helpful aspects. Property management, as the name suggests, is meant to deal with the proper management services and scrutiny of various properties. Nonetheless, property management is a particular discipline of defining and achieving targets in matters of properties. At the same time its primary purpose is to optimize the varied utilizations of resources including energy, space, time, people, technology and many others. But for every property management, time constraints play a major part in the whole process.

For every property management, work is conducted under the supervision of an individual property manager. It is the responsibility of the property manager to organize and supervise the work that needs to be done. There is a lot of software on the market that is designed to make a property manager's job easier.

All the property works are primarily planned through the application of software that not only gives the virtual image of the whole property, but also errorless calculations and accounting works, cost factors, management planning and such other works. Although the best property management professionals are hired for the projects, computer software gives the detailed analysis of the plan, including the calculations and statistical implications. There is even web-based software to manage and facilitate the handling of properties.

Property Management Software provides detailed information on Property Management Software, Real Estate Property Management Software, Rental Property Management Software, Property Management Accounting Software and more. Property Management Software is affiliated with Healthcare PM Software.

Rental Property Management - Ten Questions

Why hire rental property management? Because doing it all yourself is the surest way to make your real estate investment experience a bitter one. You also have more time to find the next deal when there is someone taking care of the details for you. Hire a good property manager, but first ask the following questions.

1. How much is the fee? Fees vary around the country from as low as 4% of gross rents for larger buildings, to as high as 12% for single family homes. Be sure the fee is clearly stated and understood.

2. What other properties do they manage? It is best if they handle rental properties that are similar to yours. It is also helpful to drive by their other properties to see how they are maintained.

3. Who will actually handle your property? It is best if one person handles your building all the time. They should also have some experience. Get their name.

4. What costs extra? Is it extra for showings? Do evictions cost extra (beyond the legal fees)? Any other extras?

5. How is the fee collected and when? Will you be billed, or will it be deducted from your account directly? Monthly? Quarterly?

6. What type of advertising? How do they advertise the units and what does it typically cost you?

7. Cost and time to prepare units? What is the typical cleaning fee on a vacancy, and how long will it normally be before it's rented out again?

8. What needs owner approval? What dollar amount needs your authorization, and is this negotiable?

9. Hours of operation? What are their business hours, and who takes weekend calls?

10. Accounting? What reports do they send? How often? How are accounts set up?

There are probably other questions you'll have as well, based on your particular needs and the particular property. Ask everything up front, and you'll have fewer misunderstandings. With good rental property management, real estate investing is a lot less stressful.

Steve Gillman has invested real estate for years. To learn more, and to see a photo of a beautiful house he and his wife bought for $17,500, visit http://www.HousesUnderFiftyThousand.com