If you are a real estate agent who is also a licensed insurance agent in the State of California, we’d like to talk to you.

Contact Duke Leffler today to find out how to take advantage of your unique situation and add value to your business with PMZ Insurance Services.

Everyone loves the smell of fresh baked cookies.  How about replicating that smell for each of your open houses, without having to bake any?
Place a couple of drops of vanilla extract in the oven and crank it to low. Try it out!

I was checking out the Modesto Bee headlines this morning, and I noticed that one of our agents made the BizLines for this week. Our own Carol Robertson from our Carpenter office has won the designation of Certified Residential Specialist (CRS). Fewer than 38,000 real estate agents nationwide have earned the credential which includes extensive training above and beyond professional real estate training.

Congratulations Carol!

In today’s staff meeting we covered some very interesting topics. So for those of you who weren’t able to make it or for others who are just interested, here is a recap.

PMZ Home Loans market update:

• Interest rates below 6% are still available including for FHA and VA loans.
• Banks are tightening down restrictions on underwriting new loans. Contact a PMZ Home Loans agent so that they can step you successfully through the process.

Floyd Wickman Training update:
PMZ Real Estate agents are well into their 5th week of the 7 week training program. We heard from several agents that have found great benefit from the program. The program has helped one agent overcome her shyness, allowing her to do some phone prospecting without even breaking a sweat. Another agent learned how to consolidate all his contacts into one location and to contact at least 100 of them a month for referrals.

2008 Year to date transaction stats:

May 29th, 2008 - Mandatory Meeting at the State Theatre
May 29th, 2008, Gov Hutchinson from CAR will be joining us after our regular staff meeting to discuss some issues. The State Theatre is located at 1307 J Street, Modesto, CA.

Proposition 98 and 99
Make sure you are informed regarding these propositions when voting time comes in June. To read California Association of Realtor’s position and more about the propositions, visit their website.

One man thinks so, and a lot of other real estate professionals might agree. Especially tech savvy ones.

Galen Ward posted a blog entry regarding Trulia’s so-called “underhanded” SEO (search engine optimization practices). In most geographic areas a search for “san francisco real estate” for example will pull up Trulia’s website as the first result, burrying other relevant local real estate companies websites. Ward believes this to be unfair.

One of his very valid beefs is that Trulia makes links to your website on their website, no-follow links. This means that search engines like Google and Yahoo will ignore linking to your website, losing out on precious SEO ranking.

While it is more than likely not the case that Trulia wants to destroy your website ranking, they definitely do want to rank number one. Are you getting what you expected from your relationship with Trulia?

Also, take a look at how they optimize their website. Talk to your IT administrator to see if you can do the same. A couple things that I have noticed that would really make a difference in a real estate websites rankings is having a landing page for each city that you do business in. Also make the URL for that city search engine friendly, ie: http://www.pmz.com/modesto/ca/real-estate/ or http://www.pmz.com/stockton/ca/real-estate/. For each of those landing pages, in the title and metadescription, include something like, “Modesto Real Estate & Modesto Homes for Sale” to make it more relevant to your geographical area. That’s really just the beginning.

Doing his part to stabilize the economy, Warren Buffet, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, bought up portfolios of subprime mortgages and promised not to reset their rates.

Borrowers of the Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary Clayton Homes will be receiving letters letting them know their rates won’t be upped regardless of any economic factors.

Thanks Warren, what a nice guy.

Get ready for the 2nd Annual Valley Real Estate and Economics Conference. Last years was a great success as many people enjoyed and learned from the insights from our CEO, Mike Zagaris.

As everyone is aware, the outlook of real estate throughout the United States has changed. At the conference, this issue and other economic factors that focus specifically on the Central Valley will be discussed by a panel of professionals, including Mike Zagaris and other industry professionals.

This year’s conference will be held Wednesday, June 4th, 2008 at 7:30am-5:00pm at the Modesto Centre Plaza. The cost of the conference is $60 which includes breakfast and lunch. You can also receive 7 hours of DRE CE Credit.

For more details, click to see the attached PDF.

Real Estate professionals, want to know what clients really think about you? Want to hear what they really want or what they’re interested in?

You should check out Tweet Scan. Tweet Scan is a web application that allows you to type in any keyword you want, I did “Real Estate” and it shows you all the latest Twitters that contain the word real estate.

I’ve come accross some pretty neat marketing tricks from other Agents this way, give it a try.

By the way:  For those of you who are not familiar with Twitter.com, it is a web application that allows you to send out a short message to everyone updating them as to what you are doing, or whatever you want.  Think of it like a mini-blog.  People can subscribe to you and follow what you’re doing or “twittering” about. So far, Twitter is over 1 million users strong and growing every day.

If you have a need for a small table, but need it to expand to accommodate more people for party’s or what-not, check this one out. I never thought I would say it about a table, but this one is amazing!

Does anyone know where you could buy something like this?
Update: Interested in one? Go here… DB Fletcher Design (about $50,000)

RISMedia Ranks Top 700 Brokers in 20^th Annual Power Broker Report & Survey

PMZ Real Estate is proud to announce that it has been named to RISMedia’s 20^th Annual Power Broker Report & Survey. PMZ Real Estate ranked in the top 200 real estate brokerages nationwide in closed transaction sides in the Power Broker Report, which identifies and ranks America’s largest residential real estate brokerage companies by transaction sides and sales volume.

The results of this year’s Power Broker Survey reflect the market downturn felt from coast to coast. Longer listing times, more cautious buyers and the mortgage meltdown resulted in fewer total transactions—2,322,210 in 2007 compared to 2,754,618 in 2006. Meanwhile, price appreciation continued its decline, resulting in lower total sales volume—$749,201,552,294 in 2007 compared to $855,755,959,352 in 2006.