Here are some odds and ends from the world of Fredericksburg-area business over the past week:

• Coldwell Banker Elite had the most real estate production of any Coldwell Banker firm in Virginia in 2011. The brokerage firm’s Stafford County location was Coldwell Banker’s top individual Virginia office in 2011, the ninth-straight year the Stafford office has won that distinction. And Cartus Relocation, which focuses on employee relocation services, has given Coldwell Banker Elite its platinum status for 2011 in both the Prince William County and Fredericksburg-area markets.

Author: Bill Freehling

To view the post visit Fredericksburg.com Business Insider page.

Congratulations Coldwell Banker Elite! Thank you to our amazing agent’s for all of your hard work!

If you need to print a document and you have an iPhone or an iPad you can print that document straight from your device with a FREE (best price ever) app.  No more having to fire up your computer, bring in your laptop, or find a computer to log into.

The app is called PageScope Mobile, see photo below,  and it is located in the iTunes app store.  It was created by Konica Minolta, makers of our copier/scanner.  You can print emails, attachments, photos, and more.  All you have to do is download the app and set up your email account and other settings that you wish to print from.  So now you know…

Coldwell Banker University #9!

Each year, for the past 12 years Training Magazine recognizes that best 125 companies in employee or associate development.  This year Coldwell Banker took the ninth position and was the highest ranking Real Estate Brand.

There is a tremendous amount of brand resources and talent that go into making Coldwell Banker the best education resource for our Associates.

To put our ranking into competitive perspective, we ranked #9 and our nearest brand competitor was Keller Williams at #73 (64 places behind us).  Century21 ranked #96 and Re/Max #108.

What’s Considered?

Training Magazine ranks the 125 by assessing a range of qualitative and quantitative factors, including financial investment in employee development, the scope of development programs, and how closely such development efforts are linked to business goals and objectives.

Companies that wish to be considered for Top 125 ranking complete a detailed application, which is scored both quantitatively (70 percent of total score) by an outside research and statistical data company and qualitatively (30 percent of total score) by Training magazine editors and Top 10 Hall of Fame representatives. (from Trainingmag.com)

Why?

Coldwell Banker has a vast and innovative education program.  The tools within CBWorks  are unparalleled.  With programs like Boost, eFastStart, Realtor Designations, and social learning portals there’s no doubt that agent education is a focal point within the brand.  If you haven’t checked out the BlueView Sales Associate Portal or the MBA Managing Broker Portal – what’s stopping you?  Login and take a look – I promise that you’ll learn a lot that will help you be a better agent and more successful!

VAR puts out a lot of great content, but one of my favorite tools is the Legal Hotline.  The articles in the Commonwealth magazine, VARealtor.com and the Videos are great answers to often asked questions (and a few questions we’d never think to ask.)

Here are some the latest videos.

Episode 1 (2012) – What The Regulators Are Considering for 2012

Episode 5 – Property Managers Need Licenses? | Record Keeping | Paying Referral Fees

 Episode 4 (2012) – Property Owners Associations

This week’s “Elite Marketing Tip of the Week” is about your agent profiles. As you already know, your agent profiles are extremely important. Not only do they attract clients and inform them of your background, experience, and expertise but they are indexable by the search engines. Due to this, real estate agent’s put their agent bios/profiles everywhere they can possibly think of; their website, their company’s website, their social media sites, real estate sites like Realtor.com and Zillow.com. This is fantastic and should be done, however, agent’s often copy their profile/bio and paste the same profile/bio on every single site they are on. Do not do this.

Why do you ask?

Google will not give you credit on multiple sites for the same or “close to the same” profile/bio. For instance, if you have the same exact profile/bio on ColdwellBankerElite.com, your personal website, and Realtor.com, you will only get credit on one site instead of all three and may even penalize you for duplicate content. In February of 2011, Google launched a change to their algorithm called Google Panda. The main focus of this algorithm change was to lower the search result ranks of “low-quality” sites and restore high quality sites to the top of the search results. Unique and quality content (profiles counting as unique content) are one of the main features the Panda algorithm focused on.

The solution to this is to create a unique, quality profile for each site. Below you will find a neat infographic by SingleGrain, which explains Panda is “plain English”.

Infographic by SingleGrain

This is a great summary of our up and coming client base.

Protecting the Buyer

Currently the NVAR contracts library does not have a standard form for Buyer Agents to use when asking for the Sellers to do Home Inspection repairs.  Because of this often times agents will use a blank Addendum form and outline the repairs.  I’ve reviewed and negotiated countless Home Inspections and very often the agent writes something like this:

The buyers request the sellers to make the following repairs…

That’s it!  That’s all that’s written!  So, if I were the Seller, I’d sign off in a heart-beat, because all I’m doing is acknowledging that the buyer had a desire for certain repairs. I didn’t necessarily elect to make those repairs and even if I had, there’s no stipulation as to the quality or type of work.

Let’s Try This

It’s take a look at the different factors that we should be asking for when negotiating for home repairs.  The following list of considerations should be made.

• First, let’s identify who is doing what.  The Purchaser is requesting repairs to be made and by signing the agreement we want the Sellers to be compelled to make those repairs.
• We want the Seller’s to pay for the repairs and for the work to be done by professionals who are licensed or certified to do such repairs
• We want evidence of the repairs to be given prior to closing.  ’Prior’ is important.  Getting the receipts or doing a walk through the morning of closing makes no sense.  If the repairs weren’t done appropriately than you’ve left no time to make those repairs prior to closing.  Therefore we either delay closing, escrow repair costs (good luck with that) or the buyer accepts the home in the condition of ill repair.
• The agent should make sure that the Seller doesn’t “pull a fast one” and replace that really nice, but malfunctioning refrigerator with something he found at the scratch-n-dent store.
• Lastly, we want to make sure that the Buyer has sufficient rights to inspect the work prior to closing.  The current NVAR Regional Sales Contract gives the buyer an opportunity to inspect the property five days before the closing date.  If you read it carefully one could argue that the verbiage would only permit one inspection.  This prompts two thoughts.  The first is that we should ask for repairs to be done at least five days prior to closing and secondly that the Buyer have more than one opportunity to make inspections.  If you do your inspection five days prior to closing and the work still isn’t done OR you want to make one final walk-thru the morning of closing after the Seller has moved out, there shouldn’t be a limitation to the number of inspections.

Now I know this is a lot to remember each and every time you write a Home Inspection addendum, so for Coldwell Banker Elite agents, we’ve created a Clause Library in your Zipform accounts.  Now you can  simply add a clause that we’ve created right into the addendum and keep on writing.

Here’s How You Do It

Originally posted on the GenBlue website

The Generation Blue Experience app is back for 2012 and available to download on your iPhone, Android and iPad! It has all the features you loved from last year’s app, but updated with all the details for the 2012 Coldwell Banker Generation Blue Experience in New Orleans. There are also a few new surprises in store.

Here’s a look at some of the features:

• Create a custom agenda by “starring” the classes you want to make sure you attend
• Get details on all the speakers including their bios, links to their Facebook profile, Twitter handles and more
• The new “Bead Me” feature lets you add Mardi Gras style beads to any photo you take and you can share those photos on Facebook
• Social feeds from all the Gen Blue channels like the blog, Facebook and Twitter will let you see what everyone is saying about this year’s event
• Video section lets you watch highlights from last year’s event as well as promo video for this year’s experience
• The lighter returns for those who feel the need to be part of a sea of lighters during the general sessions or welcome/closing parties
• And the best part is the app works offline so you can manage your schedule and get event info even when you have no signal!

The Generation Blue Experience app is the first thing you should pack for your trip to New Orleans. You can download it from the Android Market and iPhone/iPad App Store by just searching “Generation Blue Experience” or by clicking the links below. Don’t miss out on the experience! Download the Coldwell Banker Generation Blue Experience app today!

Click here to download the Gen Blue iPhone/iPad app

Click here to download the Gen Blue Android app

Every day as professional real estate agent, we work hard to make sure that Homeownership matters and is a part of the American dream.  Did you know that for many, that isn’t always the case!  Unfortunately many in our area need help with down payments for rent, utilities, finding a place quickly when their home has had a fire and to be truthful the list goes on and on.

But did you know that we do have a way to help and for years we have.  It is your Fredericksburg REALTOR Foundation!  We have been serving our 5 counties for over 10 years.  We have given financial support to a very long list including, American Red Cross, Homes for our Troops, CVHC, Habitat for Humanity, Ronald McDonald House in Richmond, Christmas in April and Hope House to name a few .  If it is housing related – we probably have support them quietly and in the background.  In 2010 we received a grant from NAR that launched the Hands Up for Educator program.  It was a huge success, but we need to refocus, regroup and re-engage!

That leads us to now!  On May 12, 2012 we will be hosting our first annual Regional High School Art Show.  The Art show will be held at the Expo Center!  The space has been generously donated which is amazing and we are extremely thankful!   It seems that the students understand the importance of giving back to our communities and they are willing to donate their hard work to us so that we can sell the pieces to continue to support housing related issues.

This is a huge undertaking; we are very nervous and excited as this crosses so many facets.  It involves local students who care, the Expo who has donated the facility, the Foundation members who are working to make this a successful event and most of all those who will benefit from the success of the art show.

We will continue to keep you updated on the upcoming event and we hope that many of you will come to the art show and purchase art from these up and coming artist who may someday be world renowned!

Welcome to this weeks “Elite Marketing Tip of the Week”! As I mentioned in the title, this weeks Marketing Tips of the Week will involve SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Let’s start with a common question, what is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization is the science of designing, writing, and coding Web site pages to increase the likelihood that they appear at the top of search engine’s organic results. In other words, SEO increases the visibility of your Web site through each search engine’s natural search results.

Core Components of SEO

• Quality Content: Make sure that the content on your website is valuable to your target audience.
• Customize the content on all of your site’s pages
• Write unique content that is worth reading and sharing
• Update your content periodically
• Keywords: Make your website easy for your ideal clients to find by using their preferred words.
• Identify the keywords your target audience will type in Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
• Focus on keywords that will get you a better rank
• Focus on hyper-local keywords not broad keywords
• Put keywords in your content, on page titles, headers, sub-headers, images, videos, links, etc.
• Links: Help buyers and sellers find your website by linking to it from other sites.
• Link to your site from multiple topic-relevant sites
• Link from both social and information sites (blogs, hyper-local sites, social media sites, etc.)
• Social: Get your site to show in your friends’ search results.
• Build your online connections/friends
• Link to your website regularly (updates, new blog posts, relevant information, etc.)

I hope this helps! For more in depth information on SEO, sign up for my “Websites & SEO” class in March.