Real Estate Virtual Assistant

Sam Callahan, the son of a Realtor (and my friend & Active Rain member) in Silicon Valley, is 14 years old and has cancer which is not responding to two different types of chemotherapy.  His cancer, Ewing's Sarcoma, had metasticized before it was discovered on September 22nd. 

Sam writes about his battle with Ewing's Sarcoma on the Sam's Team website: http://www.samsteam.org/About_Sam.html He is an amazing 8th grader with a good attitude who wants to beat this thing.  If you read his "about Sam" page, you'll find he's a great writer, too.

Normally, we can feel very helpless to "do anything" besides offer our compassion, thoughts and prayers. 

But this time, there IS something you can do, and it only takes a couple of minutes.  It may not change how he feels after radiation or chemo, but it will lift his spirits and those of his family and friends to see an outpouring of support.  And it will help Sam and his family to make a little goal they've set up for themselves.

In addition to the website, Sam's family & friends have a "fan page" on Facebook.  It's called I'm On Sam's Team.    Their modest goal is to have 5000 fans by St. Patrick's Day.  I'd like to help them get there.  As of this moment, they have 2608 fans.  They want people to know about Ewing's Sarcoma and they want people to know about Sam and his battle with this cancer.

What To Do:  So, my Active Rain friends, I know a lot of you are on Facebook.  If not, this might be the right time to join! 

1. Please take a moment and log into Facebook.
2. Go to the Search bar and key in I'm On Sam's Team
3. At the very top, in the middle, there's a button which says Become A Fan - click on it

That's it.  How easy it is to send some support and encouragement!  Of course, read through the website and the FB page too!  But it only takes a minute to "fan" a page. 

Just to reiterate, Sam is someone I know, it's not one of those fake internet hoaxes and he's part of the real estate family (his dad's a Realtor).  Join us on Sam's Team!  Please re-blog!

I have an investment property in Florida. In the last three years, twice I’ve listed it for sale. Twice I’ve ended up renting it. Twice I’ve relied on my agentto help me with the decision making that took me down this path to simply get the home occupied. It is a big reality that today’s real estate market is forcing many people, like myself, to wear the landlord hat because of market conditions.

Today I am excited to announce that Zillow is expanding its marketing services to not only include homes FOR SALE, but now also include the ability to market homes as being FOR RENT.

Zillowhas always been a little different than other real estate sites because our foundation is a data base of ALL homes, not just homes that are currently on the market. Today we have about 93M property records on the site, with about 3.6M of them having been flagged as being for sale. Because of this, we get people in all stages of home ownership, from renting to buying to owning.

According to the U.S. Census American Housing Survey 2005, there are 34M rental households in the US, with 53% of rentals being 4 units or less and 30% being single family homes. And when we look at the 8M+ people that visit Zillow each month, nearly 1M of them are exclusively renters with untold others “on the fence” on whether to buy or rent.

So what is Zillow’s new product?

• Zillow offers a Featured Rental Listing for just $9.95 for 180 days. Featured Listings are sorted to the top of search resultsand receive six times more views than non-featured listings.
• Rich rental listings can be created with unlimited photos and detailed property information, and you only have to post this information once for up to 180 days.

How will people find my Rental Listing on Zillow?

• Of course we’ll have the standard search, but we couldn’t just stop there.
• Zillow has built the industry’s first search by monthly payment– allowing users to simultaneously search for homes for sale and for rent based on a monthly payment they can afford. (monthly payment on homes for sale will be calculated using that day’s mortgage rate for a 30-year fixed mortgage rate, assuming 20% down)

Zillow’s goal is to help people make intelligent and informed choices in all stages of life – whether they are renting, deciding whether to rent or buy, shopping for a home today, refinancing, remodeling or just dreaming. With the addition of rental listings and search, we are giving our users another tool to help them throughout their decision making process.

Click here to experience the For Rent search on Zillow.

Announcement on the Zillow Blog.

Post a home for rent.  

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Hi folks, As most of you know I run a virtual real estate office. What this means is that my associates and I all work from our homes. I do most of my business over the Internet. I rarely talk on the phone. And I rarely show properties.

I list Florida properties for sale without ever meeting the Sellers and I sell Florida properties without ever meeting the Buyers. This is my preferred way of handling business. I mostly communicate via email and text messages.

I have found that conducting business like this is very efficient. I am able to spend more time communicating with my customers because I am not wasting time driving around looking at properties and talking on the phone for an hour when an email would deliver the same information.

The other advantage of handling communications via email and text messaging is that there is far less confusion. I rarely have to deal with “he said she said”. All I have to do is pull up the conversation thread and everything we “said” is right there in writing. No confusion. No mistakes.

Here are a few tools I couldn’t live without.

• Gmail. The labeling feature in Gmail is my filing cabinet.

• GoogleDocs. Everything I need online and there when I need it. I can also invite others to edit the same document. And don’t get me started on Google forms. The best thing since sliced bread.

• Picasa and web albums. How would you like it if you asked the listing agent for additional photos and they could connect you with an album online that had dozens of them?

• Scribd.com. What if your Seller can’t receive a 100 page attachment? Just upload the document to Scribd and send the seller a link.

• Skype. Do a lot of International business? $12.95 (or so) a month and I can call anywhere in the world. I can even talk via webcam.

• PDFill.com. Can’t afford Adobe Professional? Try this one for a one time fee of $12.95 (or so). Never use your printer again.

• Google Groups. Need a FREE meeting place for your team? Go check it out

• Veoh.com or YouTube for sharing videos of properties.

OK. That’s it for now. I have many more tools that I use everyday to make my life easier and less time consuming. My goal for next year is to be able run my entire Florida Real Estate business from my iPhone. How cool would that be?

***If you are an experienced agent and want to work for a virtual real estate company then check out my company site at www.TTRealtyNet.com.

 

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