Oregon Educator Home Loan Program

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I was listening to a webinar this week and the speaker was talking about marketing to past clients, here is his quote:

“Doing anything is better than doing nothing!”

I had posted previously about a great FREE book by Howard Mann called Your Business Brickyard.

There is a chapter in the book that really resonates with me and that is “all truth is in the cash account”.

Basically your real estate business is exactly that – a business and needs to be run on the same principles that apply to all other industries – you must make a profit to sustain.

I hear often from agents that they are doing well, however when I ask them if they are profitable they really don’t know or understand what I am talking about.  They see the income coming as “wages” and are not truly grasping the notion of profit.

I was fortunate at an early point in my career as a Mortgage Advisor that I partnered with someone who thoroughly understood the profit & loss concepts, and the P & L has become our only monthly report that we both monitor constantly.

If you need help with this, please feel free to email me, or I would also recommend you go to thecore.tv and order a Blue Beast from Rick Ruby who is a professional real estate trainer and has put together a great system for tracking your P&L, your Pay Log, and a Personal Household Budget.

37signals.com has become a very successful company and offers many different products that keep the end user in mind, but today I would like to discuss their most popular product, BaseCamp, which I have recently began using in my mortgage advisor business.

My initial decision to use the product was forced by one of my clients who wanted to send me some files from his computer that were too large to email.  I had been wanting to try BaseCamp (or something like it – there are others) and this gave me the perfect excuse to give it a go.

Within minutes I had my new account set-up.  A few minutes more and I had uploaded my logo and photo and created a “project” for my client.  I set up the permissions for access to the project (myself & my client) and the system emailed my my client to create a log-in.

Within the project I was able to create messages for my client and produce “Milestones” outlining the time-frame of our transaction.  Once these were in place I was able to subscribe to these milestones through my calendar software (Outlook) and it created a calendar that I could use to track this specific project.  What’s great about this is that if there is a change in one of my Milestones (i.e. Appraisal may be delayed a day) it will transfer these changes to the calendar.

Later that day I received a notification that my client had created their account and logged in.  A little while later I was notified that he had uploaded some documents for me to review.  The site is SSL Secure so all documents are encrypted during both the upload and downloading making it more secure than unencrypted emails which my clients use far too often.

I informed my client that he was my “beta” tester of this new product.  I wanted to insure that there was very little learning curve on his part.  I am very comfortable with new technology and figuring things out, but I know a lot of my clients have various levels of computer use skills.

My client’s feedback has been great – he loves the feeling of a central place to go to look at all our communications and we are able to collaborate on his transaction with out always having to deal with emails, voice-mails, etc. and he told me his file upload was very easy.

I believe BaseCamp offers a great tool for real estate agents to use as well.  Imagine having all file documents readily available to bot you and your client.  Need to look at the inspection reports?  There they are.  The purchase contract? Yep, it’s there too.

Milestones?  Agent hears from the client’s lender that the loan documents may be delayed, makes the change, and both the clients and agents calendars are instantly updated.

Have an assistant?  You can give your assistant access to the project as well and assign him/her tasks keeping your whole team on the same page on each project.

If any of you are already using BaseCamp (or similar program) with your clients I would love to hear what you are doing.

My point to my clients is that this is not a means to end our normal channels of communication (phone calls, emails, etc.) but rather to enhance the communication between us which is so critical on every transaction.

*Full Disclosure – BaseCamp has an affiliate marketing program meaning if you sign up through my links I get credit off of my monthly bill, but that’s not why I posted this – I really do like the program and am using it with my clients.

One of the many things I love about Seth Godin is his ability to see what we all see yet put this into words.  In a recent post on his blog entitled “Is Effort A Myth?” Seth gives an easy-to-follow plan showing just how a far a little more effort may have outstanding results. Godin suggests that we simply eliminate 120 minutes per day of wasted time (ie, TV, etc) and replace these minute with 120 productive minutes. I am implementing this right now, and am immediately seeing some great results.

Howard Mann, author and founder of SlideShowDigital  has a new book out titled Your Business Brickyard.You can purchase the hardcover on Amazon for $19.95, or you can get the FREE online version here: http://www.tbbpartners.com/book/ Yes, I did say FREE. I downloaded this book last week and absolutely loved it.