While real estate agents generally report feeling very safe on the job, there have been several reported cases over the last few years where realtors were brutally attacked.

When you think about it, being a realtor does put you in potentially hazardous situations. From being alone in an open house, to meeting customers for the first time in front of an empty property, to driving with new clients to home showings, all of these are potentially risky situations if the “client” has malice in mind.

That’s why it’s important to be prepared – without allowing fear to compromise your ability to do your job.

Here are a few real estate agent safety tips:

1. Don’t trust new clients until you get to know them. The first meeting with a new client should take place in your office and not in remote location. You should also verify a new client’s information prior to beginning working with them.

2. If possible, it’s best to drive to locations separately. In addition, when showing a property to a new client, follow him into the house rather than leading him in.

3. Always carry a cell phone with you, and program it to dial 911 at the touch of a button. It’s also a good idea to always carry pepper spray or mace.

4. Every morning, give someone in your office an itinerary of the properties you plan to show that day and check back with the office often. Office staff should know to call you if they haven’t heard from you in a couple of hours.

5. Most importantly: trust your instincts. If a situation, or a person, seems suspicious, get out of there immediately. You can always apologize later and explain what happened, but it’s definitely better to be safe than sorry.

A real estate business is essentially a small business. As a small business owner, there are several things you can do to effectively build your business while keeping yourself from financial debt or from losing yourself in your business and neglecting other areas of your life.

Last  week we discussed the importance of having a business plan in place, of creating a budget and of keeping life-work balance.

Here are three more business tips for realtors:

1. Find a mentor. If you’re just staring out in the real estate space, you could learn a lot – and avoid making costly mistakes – if you can find an experienced agent who would be willing to teach you and help you survive the first year.

2. Add everyone you know to your contact list, and keep in regular touch with them. Your goal is to be top of mind when it’s time for them to use a realtor. An automated email drip marketing tool can be very helpful and enable you to keep in touch with prospects and with former clients easily.

3. Explore cost effective ways to be visible in your community. You should definitely have an agent website. In addition, a great, affordable way to build a name for yourself is to use social media tools, including a blog, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

One of the most important things you can do to build your real estate business is to keep learning and developing as a professional. Read books and publications, attend seminars, and then share your knowledge via social media. Over the course of a few months, this is a great way to build a name for yourself and to establish yourself as a real estate expert.

Building a real estate business is tough these days. We should know! We are in the real estate business too. Competition is fierce – fiercer than it’s ever been it seems, and the number of realtors seems to be growing by the minute. Combined with a prolonged recession, these are tough times for realtors. But a business, any business, should be built for the long term. And if you do it right, you should e able to survive the tough times and benefit from the good times.

Three tips for building your real estate business (three more in the next post):

1. Create a business plan. Very few realtors do this, but creating a written business plan is vital. This need not be complicated – your plan can be fairly simple and short. You should basically see where you are now, where you want to be, say, ten years from now, and list the steps that you need to take in order to get there (such as taking classes or starting a blog).

2. Create an annul budget. Include your projected marketing costs, any additional costs you expect to incur such as education, and your projected income. None of this will be 100% accurate, but you should still have at least a general plan.

3. Remember work-life balance. Just like any other small business, your real estate business could easily take over your life. Any small business owner will tell you that if they are not careful, they can find themselves working around the clock. Don’t let it happen to you! Make sure to spend time with your family and friends, and to have some alone time too.

Please stay tuned for our next blog post, where we will discuss three more business tips for real estate professionals.

These days, a big chunk of your real estate marketing activities is done online. Savvy agents are using agent websites, single property websites, blogs and social media to market their services and their listings.

But offline marketing is still important. In fact, marketing is never about just one medium. A good marketing campaign utilizes many different mediums to generate many different leads, then nurtures them until they are ready to become clients.

Which brings us to the topic of real estate flyers. No doubt, real estate flyers, when done right, can be a low-cost and highly effective real estate marketing tool. Follow these tips to get the most out of your real estate flyers:

1. Full color flyers on a glossy paper look significantly more professional than black and white flyers. It’s also important to use high quality images in your flyers.

2. When designing the flyer, try to convey the look and feel of the house through the flyer’s design and colors.

3. Each flyer should include easy-to-read bullet points highlighting the benefits of each property. You should always highlight benefits rather than features. For example, instead of “large grassy yard” say, “the large grassy yard is great for children and perfect for outdoor entertaining.”

4. A single-page flyer is almost always preferable to a multi-page one.

5. Make sure your contact information is easy to find, and include a way to directly track flyer performance, such as a specific phone number or a code.

One of the best ways to distribute real estate flyers is to print them in bulk and insert them into local newspapers. This is more affordable, and at least as effective, as direct mail.

An agent website is one of the best tools available to you for establishing yourself as a real estate expert.

Think about it: as more and more people are starting their search for a home online, and as more and more people expect professionals to have a web presence, you simply can’t afford NOT to have a website.

If you don’t have a website, or if you have a poorly designed agent site, many potential clients will immediately dismiss you as “not serious,” “unprofessional” or as a non-savvy realtor.

In fact, this is true for any small business these days. Regardless of how small a business is, it should have a website if it is to be taken seriously by customers.

The good news: creating a website today is much easier, and certainly more affordable, than it used to be just a decade ago. Reputable real estate website providers such as Properties Online enable you to create a professionally designed, affordable agent website with all the tools you need in today’s technology driven market, including SEO tools, social media tools and more.

Think about your real estate site as your digital business card, or your online portfolio. An agent site provides you with an excellent way to prove to prospects that you are everything they’ve been looking for in an agent – that you are savvy, experienced, knowledgeable, and not afraid of leveraging technology as a marketing tool.

Email can be a great marketing tool for realtors. Sure, our main focus these days is on the Internet, and this includes having a high quality agent website filled with valuable information, and on using social media tools to connect with clients and prospects and to establish yourself as a real estate expert. But you shouldn’t neglect email – it’s still an important communication tool for most people and can definitely help you market your real estate business.

A few email tips for realtors:

1. Add a link to your website and to your social networks to your email signature. You probably send out many emails per day. Each such email can serve to effortlessly market your agent site if you simply include a link in your email signature.

2. Use email to stay in touch with prospects and with clients. Having someone in your database is worthless if you never communicate with them. Send your contacts periodic updates on the real estate market, tips on home buying and selling, and even personal notes on birthdays and anniversaries.

3. Don’t overdo it. While staying in touch is important, you should remember that your clients and prospects are just as busy as you are and space out your communications with them so that they are never seen as spam. Keep your messages short and clear, avoid attachments, and write short, catchy email titles that will entice your recipients to click through and read your email.

4. Automate your email marketing. If your contact list contains more than a handful of emails, keeping in touch with all of them can be very time consuming. Invest in an affordable email drip marketing system that would enable you to effortlessly keep in touch and stay top of mind with your contacts.

Is now finally the time to buy a house? In many ways, and in many local markets, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. Home values in many markets have plummeted back to 2003 levels, fixed mortgage rates are near record lows, and the much anticipated economic recovery seems to be underway.

While now is generally a good time to enter the real estate market, unemployment rates are still high, and obviously it doesn’t make sense to take a mortgage unless you’re fairly certain that you are not going to be laid off. So the question of how secure your job is becomes a major factor.

In addition, it’s important to realize that although the housing bubble has burst in most US markets, there are still some local bubbles around the nation, so if you reside in one of them, it may still be prudent to keep waiting. A good way to determine whether your local real estate market is still in a bubble is to look at the rent ratio – the higher it is, the more cautious you should be.

The bottom line: the housing market is not detached from underlying economic factors such as growth in jobs, growth in output and rising consumer confidence. Watch for those, as well as for the rent ratio in your community, and take into account the stability of your own job. All of these factors should be considered before you decide whether now is a good time to enter the real estate market. From where we are, all of these numbers look positive – but the ultimate decision should of course be yours and based on your individual situation.

Staging your home prior to showing it increases the likelihood of a sale, even in a buyers’ market. It reduces the time the home spends on the market, helps to justify the asking price and it can also prepare you to the move, because a big part of home staging is organizing and decluttering.

Whether you do it by yourself or hire a professional, here are a few simple home staging tips. These are basic tips – in a buyers’ market you may need to go through more trouble, including some basic remodeling.

1. The most important home staging tip is “look at your house through the eyes of a potential buyer.” Your beloved knick knacks will be no more than clutter to a buyer. A little grime in the bathroom? HUGE turnoff for a buyer. And that red dining room wall that you love so much? Remember that most buyers prefer neytral colors.

2. The exterior of the house needs to be staged too. This includes painting if needed, mowing the lawn, and in general making sure the house has great curb appeal.

3. Entryway needs to be open, well lighted and free of clutter. A simple way to immediately transform your entryway is to replace the worn welcome mat!

4. Clear the living room and dining room of family photos and personal items. These convey a message of “I live here, you don’t” – but you want buyers to be able to imagine themselves living in the house. If the room is too crowded, move some of the furniture into the garage. You want it to look spacious and inviting.

5. The kitchen and the bathrooms absolutely have to sparkle. Any hint of dirt or grime in these rooms is a huge – HUGE – turnoff. Make sure counters are completely bare except for a few decorative items. Place al personal items in drawers and place fresh plush towels and flowers on counters. If your bathroom fixtures are outdated, replace them with sleek and modern fixtures

6.  To make bedrooms appear spacious and comfortable, remove any furniture that clutters the room and most personal items such as photos and knick knacks; remove at least half of your clothes from the closets and pack them (you’ll need to do this soon anyway!) and make sure the bed is perfectly made with high-quality linens.

Generally, when staging a home, you need to keep these words in mind: VERY clean, uncluttered, well lighted, spacious and comfortable. If you can manage to do this in every room of the house, your chances of selling it quickly, for the asking price or more, will be significantly higher.

In the insanely competitive real estate space, landing a client once isn’t enough: you want to stay top of mind with that client even after you have finished working for them, so that they can return to you with their future real estate needs, and – just as important – refer their friends, neighbors and acquaintances.

Keeping in touch with former clients means, above all, being useful to them. You don’t want to nag, or to clog their inbox with annoying emails. You want to keep in touch in a way that makes you valuable, and your emails welcome. This usually means providing information such as real estate market info for their area, or useful tips for buying, selling and maintaining a home.

While phone calls and cards are certainly an option, email is definitely the easiest way to keep in touch with clients. But “easy” is a relative term, and for most real estate professionals, the problem is that they are so busy keeping up with their current clients, maintaining their website and blog and looking for new leads, that it’s very difficult for them to find the time to keep in touch with past clients.

The result: often, past clients fall through the cracks and eventually the connection is lost. When it’s time for them to recommend an agent, or to use a realtor, they simply don’t have you in mind – so they pick someone else.

In our experience as realtors, the best way to avoid these situations and to effectively and effortlessly keep in touch with past clients is to use an email drip marketing system, which automates your emails to clients and makes sure you can stay in touch and provide valuable info with minimal effort.

All you need to do is enter the client’s email address into the system, and the system does the rest automatically. Essentially, you are sending repeated, relevant messages to former clients until they are ready to use your services again, or to recommend you to a friend.

Make sure past clients are repeat clients. Stay in touch!

We are excited to tell you about a new feature upgrade for your agent website. We have just added Listing Syndication to our growing list of website features for our.

We have just completed beta testing our new Listing Syndication tool that will allow you to feed your listing data to the major property website portals like Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo Real Estate and several others.

To take advantage of this free service, login to your account and click on the new “Syndication” tool located on the Main Menu. This is the page you see first when you login.