tempsora.info

Even though it is the stuff that makes us tear up in movies and television shows, giving a puppy as a Christmas present is rarely a good idea. Despite all of your best intentions, adding a furry family member needs very careful consideration.

The holidays are a stressful time for most people. There is a ton of hustle and bustle about the home every day. There may be family traveling in, or you may need to travel to them. There are presents to wrap and food to cook. Now, add an 8 week old puppy to the mix and someone is going to howl for sure!

Having a new puppy is, well, expensive. There are the costs of acquiring the puppy, plus all the “must-haves” that need to be purchased. There are the expenses for Veterinary care and puppy-proofing the home. Not too mention, replacing anything that little Marmaduke happens to chew on with those baby teeth. Christmas is probably not the best time of year to add on a list of expenses.

Then, there is the little-known issue of whether or not the puppy will be healthy. See, most reputable breeders actually will refuse to sell puppies at Christmas, for fear they will not be accepted or cared for properly. Or, the fact that someone may end up allergic and that would break everyone’s heart. Unfortunately, puppy mills breed their dogs to make money around the holidays. It seems that pet stores make a lot of money and most of it is off of puppies bred solely for profit. The saddest part here is that many are in-bred and come to their new homes with genetic defects, illnesses and many other ailments. And, way too many times, they end up at shelters.

So, before purchasing a puppy as a gift this Christmas here are some ideas that should help:

• Check with your local shelter about a gift certificate-then, go AFTER the holidays are over.
• Buy a few books on dogs—fun and interesting for the children to read. This way, they can learn about how to raise a puppy and get ready for the big day.
• Pet-sit for a day. Borrow a friend’s dog for the day. This will allow the children to have all the fun of playing with a friendly dog, but not necessarily the hard work of it all. Just be sure the dog is kid-friendly
• Plan for the puppy. Make a calendar of when you plan to go look at puppies. Discuss shelters vs. breeders with the family. Figure out where he or she will sleep, what they will eat, etc. Make it a family affair!
• Visit your local Veterinarian. Get to know the doctor who will be taking care of your pet. This way, the children get to ask questions, maybe even see some animals, and the whole family is comfortable with their puppy’s new doctor.

These are just some basic ideas. Try to remember that bringing home a pet is almost as important as bringing home a baby. With children, we get 9 months or so to prepare. For your new puppy, at least take a month or two to prepare. In the long run, your holidays will go smoother and everyone will end up with a family member that is loved and cherished for many Christmas’ to come.

A Lethal Listing Presentation

To create a “lethal” listing presentation, you need two pieces. What are the pieces? The first piece is knowing your market statistics so that you’re truly the best agent for the job. Becoming the market authority. Then the next piece is knowing the value of the subject property so that you can get the top dollar for your seller client. By knowing how to prepare the ultimate CMA, your foundation is complete.

Beginning the process without laying this foundation simply won’t work. It’s absolutely critical that you go through these first two steps before you learn the listing presentation, simply because the presentation builds on this foundation! If you’re just skimming through this approach so you can get to the “magic words” to say, you are wasting your time. This approach is not about having magic words. It’s about creating a magnetism that will attract your listing clients to you. That comes from building the foundation.

Without building your foundation on solid ground, you’ll instead be building your presentation on quicksand, and you won’t be able to list properties using this powerful and unique method. Why? Because you won’t have the most important element of any sale: the believability factor.

This listing approach is counter-intuitive. It is going to fly in the face of what 95% of the other agents are telling your client. As such, it demands that you have credibility. If you don’t have credibility, the listing approach will never sell because you’re asking the client to place his faith in an approach that, in all likelihood, he’s never heard of before. Take the time to build the foundation.

Last year there were more than 1.1 million Realtors in America, so I guess you could say that there are 1.1 million ways to sell a house. But the truth is that there are really only two ways to sell a house: you can sell it by price, or you can sell it by traffic. Every other sales method is a subsidiary of one of these two. We’ll explore the two different approaches at length and discuss how they differ and how one of them will yield far better results for your client while making you more money.

The Traditional or Price Approach. I’ve read dozens of books – probably hundreds of books – on the subject of real estate. Many of these books speak of the importance of listing real estate, and all of them describe nearly identical listing approaches, with only slight differences. Now, the reason for all this sameness is obvious: it’s the way listings have been done since the beginning of real estate. It’s the old “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” thing. Well, I’m here to tell you that it is broke! If you expect to make a lot of money in real estate, you need to determine what everybody else is doing and then do the opposite.

Okay, here’s the basic formula for the “traditional” or “price” approach. As you’ll recall, we talked earlier about building a CMA, or comparative market analysis, for your client. The traditional approach teaches us to find the “reasonable range” of value and then try to list the property on the low end of that range. That’s why we used closed comparables only, and not active listings as comparables. It’s why we aren’t taught to adjust upward for the list-to-sale ratio. We start as low as the client will let us.

If the home doesn’t sell within a month or so, we’re all taught to…what? You got it! To ask for a reduction in price. Then if the property still doesn’t sell, we lower the price again, and again, and again, until eventually we find a buyer for the place. Think about it: we’re selling the house by price. We’re using the price as our marketing tool. That’s why we continue to lower the price, or wait for appreciation in the market to lower the price for us, until the house eventually sells.

One of the reasons this approach works well for the agent is that it places the entire burden of selling the home on the seller! Another reason for using the traditional approach is that the agent doesn’t have to spend a lot of money marketing the house. He doesn’t have to spend a lot of time or effort devising a marketing plan or promoting the property because the price is doing the selling for him. There’s no doubt that this approach will work, of course: it’s been working for decades with good and bad agents alike. However, there are a few drawbacks to the traditional approach that are seldom mentioned.

First and foremost is the agency issue. It’s your job as the listing agent to represent the seller’s interests, which include getting the absolute top dollar for the property. However, most agents don’t get top dollar when they use this approach, and the reason is as simple as supply-and-demand. When there are fewer buyers competing for a home, the sale price may need to be discounted substantially in order to attract interest. In economics-speak, “with a fixed supply and a scarce demand (i.e. fewer buyers), prices drop.”

Another drawback to using this approach is lack of speed: several months may pass before the traditional approach begins to have an effect. In the process, the home often becomes stigmatized. After several reductions, it’s not even shown to potential buyers because it’s been on the market “too long” and is now assumed to have something wrong with it. If the agent starts the process too high and then reduces the price too slowly, the home becomes very difficult to sell at any price.

Many times, listing agents unwittingly become de-facto buyer sub-agents. Even though I don’t know a single listing agent who would intentionally sell out his client, it’s entirely too easy with the traditional listing approach to help the buyer rather than the seller. And, yes, I realize that my judgment may sound harsh, but if you’ll honestly examine this method, you’ll have to agree that, very often, it doesn’t yield the best results for the seller.