PropertyManagementMaven: April 2010

I want to start by saying I do not have any relationship with Lowe's in anyway. But there are free tools available to us and this is one of my favorite....and worth sharing.

Lowe's Realtor Benefits is a great free program available to all Realtors. I have been a member for many years and have gotten some great referrals and new business directly from this program. There are several facets to this program. You can use it for prospects, buyers, sellers and thank you gifts.

Once you've created your free account, you can customize your prospects and clients to recieve letters, coupons and news letters that come directly from you. These are personalized to offer your buyers, sellers and potential clients 10% off coupons from Lowe's to use anyway they like. The newsletters and mailers are also specialized to help potential clients to prepare their homes for sale, for sellers, and interesting HGTV projects for new homeowners. And because you can use your own branding....it gives you a reason to contact these clients with a real benefit they can appreciate.....Coupons.

One final benefit is a 5% discount on all gift cards....which makes a Lowe's gift card a better value to include in a closing package.

If you have programs like this to share....please let us all know. Better than a standard newsletter, this program allows us another way to keep in touch with our clients, offer them something they will actually want and use, and in a personalized manner.

 

 

I found another article on MSN, this one on buying rental properties.  I found this to be a nice thumbnail article of things to do and consider prior to investing in a rental property.  I do believe that this is one of the best times that I have seen to buy rental properties, inventories are up, prices and interest rates are still down.  One of the best things that this article brings out is that you need an agent with some experience in rental or investment properties. 

I also think that it is a good idea to talk to property managers or someone that has done extensive property management to help you understand what the rents are, and what occupancy rates to expect.  Anyway, I found the article to be positive and I do agree, now is a great time to buy investment property!

http://realestate.msn.com/article.aspx?cp-documentid=23972039

 

If you're looking to buy or sell real estate in Cedar City, Utah; please give us a call.  We would love to earn your business!

 

I don't know if it's true or not, but it makes a great story.  

 

  Do you remember Kilroy?   This is interesting ... I too have often wondered about Kilroy ...... now I know.   Great piece of history. Anyone born in the mid thirties knew Kilroy.  We didn't know why but we had lapel pins with his nose hanging over the label and the top of his face above his nose with his hands hanging over the label too.  I believe it was orange colored.  No one knew why he was so well known but we all joined in! Kind of a war story  now we know!  INTERESTING?~~~~ KILROY WAS HERE!     
WHO THE HECK WAS KILROY? In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, "Speak to America," sponsored a nationwide contest to find the REAL Kilroy, offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.

Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax, Massachusetts, had evidence of his identity.

Kilroy was a 46-year old shipyard worker during the war who worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy.  His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed.  Riveters were on piecework and got paid by the rivet.

Kilroy would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn't be counted twice.  When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would erase the mark. Later on, an off-shift inspector would come through and count the rivets a second time, resulting in double pay for the riveters.

One day Kilroy's boss called him into his office.  The foreman was upset about all the wages being paid to riveters, and asked him to investigate.  It was then he realized what had been going on.

The tight spaces he had to crawl in to check the rivets didn't lend themselves to lugging around a paint can and brush, so Kilroy decided to stick with the waxy chalk.  He continued to put his checkmark on each job he inspected, but added KILROY WAS HERE 
in king-sized letters next to the check, and eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose peering over the fence and that became part of the Kilroy message.  Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks.

Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint.  With war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn't time to paint them.  As a result, Kilroy's inspection "trademark" was seen by thousands of servicemen 
who boarded the troopships the yard produced.   His message apparently rang a bell with the servicemen, because they picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South Pacific.  Before war's end, "Kilroy" had been here, there, and everywhere on the long hauls to Berlin and Tokyo.

To the troops outbound in those ships, however, he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that some jerk named Kilroy had "been there first."  As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived.

Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always "already been" wherever GIs went.  It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable (it is said to be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of lArc De Triomphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon.)

As the war went on, the legend grew.  Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI's there).  On one occasion, however, they reported seeing enemy troops painting over the Kilroy logo!  In 1945, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at the Potsdam conference.  Its first occupant was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), "Who is Kilroy?"  

To help prove his authenticity in 1946, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters.  He won the trolley car, which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up as a playhouse in the Kilroy front yard in Halifax , Massachusetts.

So, now you know the rest of the story!

 

happy wacky wednesday!  this was sent to me by one of my former sellers who DOES remember kilroy!

 

mare

 

Just the truth plain and simple….

*Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks

*A Flashlight is a case for holding dead batteries.

*A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory.

*It’s better to understand a little than misunderstand a lot.

*It may be lonely at the top, but you eat better.

*Love may be blind but marriage is a real eye opener

*Never do card tricks in front of your poker buddies

*The colder the x-ray table, the more of your body needs to be on it.

*The only substitute for good manners is fast reflexes.

*The problem with the gene pool is there is no lifeguard.

*The sooner you fall behind the more time you’ll have to catch up.

*Warning: Dates in the calendar are closer than they appear.

*Friends help you move. Real Friends help you move bodies

*You can do more with a kind word and a gun than with just a kind word

*Your Kid may be an honors student, but you’re still an idiot.

*If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.

If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything!!

                               And…

Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Just leave me the hell alone!!...I mean it stop following me. But Subscribe to my blog!!

 

 

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You only know about your prospect what your prospect tells you, until you Google them.  And sometimes you will be shocked at what you learn about them.  Have you ever been alone with a prospect who is wanted on murder charges in another state?  I have, but I didn't know it until I did a Google search.  You can't tell without checking.

Safety concerns are critically important in the real estate business, both for professionals and clients, but safety isn't the only compelling reason to Google your prospects.  Sometimes you find out that the reason they want to sell isn't the reason they gave you, or the saleability of the property isn't what they say, as was the case when I uncovered a pile of litigation from a Google search I did before doing a market analysis, which I then decided to decline doing.

We have at our fingertips all sorts of structured tools to find various pieces of information that we naturally think of when we do research on people and properties.  However, the unstructured nature of web searching, and the countless kinds of information that exist on the web, make it possible for us to find information that we might never think to specifically look for.  You just don't know what you will find, good, bad or otherwise.

When the #1 Google search result on a name & address search is a Crime Stoppers Wanted poster with a picture of a person you were alone with 10 minutes ago, and who asked you to show a remote property a little later in the day, you will come to appreciate the power of quick search for random information about your prospects as a standard practice.  That was the exact result the very first time I Googled a prospect.  Fortunately, that kind of a shock doesn't happen all that often, but it does happen.  Would you rather know, or not know?

 

David North
Real Estate Professional
Coldwell Banker Bain
www.AweHomes.com
425-836-3096 any time