Carole VanSickle Ellis
Green Pig Marketing Stunt Backfires on Brokerage
A real estate brokerage expanding into the Seattle, Washington, market got a lot of attention recently with a marketing campaign that may have misfired. The company installed about 1,500 small, green pig cutouts around the city to announce its new presence. The idea was to demonstrate how the company would ...
Dallas Area Investors Reveal Market Insights
Dallas, Texas – Seven local investors spent an hour digging into the local Dallas-Fort Worth real estate market this past Saturday, February 24, 2018, at the Think Realty National Conference & Expo. The Local Market Panel, hosted by Cathy Crowe of All Star Home Group, consisted of local experts from ...
Dallas, Texas – “We are all in different phases of stuck, and we need a bridge to productivity.” Robert Nickell, founder of REIVA, summed up his personal experience in real estate with these words. Nickell’s company offers the services of trained, dedicated virtual assistants (VAs) to real estate investors to ...
5 Economic Indicators Every Real Estate Investor Must Know
Dallas, Texas – When Carrie Cook, president of Ignite Funding, thinks about the roughly $460 million her real estate investment company is managing right before she goes to sleep at night, she sleeps just fine. While some investors might find numbers like that to be a bit intimidating even when ...
Why a Studio Apartment Could be Better than a McMansion for Your Real Estate Business
Dallas, Texas – “If you have a big, beautiful ‘McMansion’ that you’re trying to rent out right now, I’m betting you’re finding that market isn’t too hot. In fact, I’m betting a one-bedroom apartment or a studio might be much hotter, and I’ll tell you why.” That’s how Gene Guarino, ...
Real Estate Cryptocurrency to Launch Soon
A real estate firm in Los Angeles, California, has come up with a new way to fund real estate investments that literally cashes in on the investment trends associated with cryptocurrency. The company, Aperture Real Estate Ventures, will launch a real estate-backed cryptocurrency at the end of February. The currency ...
Top 5 Cities for First-Time Home Buyers
Certain things make a real estate market relatively more attractive to first-time homebuyers than another. For example, first-time buyers benefit from low down payments, which tend to be found in areas with affordable median home prices, multiple financing options, and good employment opportunities upon which to base their new household ...
Mortgage Rates Hit Four-Year High
According to Freddie Mac, national average mortgage rates rose to 4.38 percent last week on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. That rate, while still historically low, is the highest posted since April 2014. 15-year fixed-rate mortgage interest rates averaged 3.84 percent (up slightly from the previous week), and five-year hybrid adjustable-rate ...
3 Things Not to do at a Real Estate Conference
We’ve talked to countless meeting hosts, presenters, and power-networkers to come up with a list of the three worst things you can do at a real estate conference. Take a hard look at this list and then, yourself. If you’ve made these mistakes in the past, be sure to avoid ...
“Buying Time” in Creative Ways
Ask a real estate investor why they left their “9-to-5,” and they’ll usually say something about having more time. Investors are, in many cases, parents and grandparents seeking more time with family. Just as often, they are passionate entrepreneurs and community servants seeking more time in which to enact their ...
Deal Funding with Credit Card Stacking
If you are a real estate investor and have been looking for capital to fund your real estate deals, there is a good chance you have heard of credit card stacking. Credit card stacking is the practice that credit brokers use to help individuals acquire credit by applying for multiple ...
Take Heed, Housing Affordability Issue to Worsen
You might expect the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) to be happy to hear about inventory shortages since that means there is a need for more new construction. But the NAHB’s chief economist has a warning to accompany the association’s latest report on home prices, mortgage interest rates, and ...
Real Estate Agent Jailed Over Profitable Short Sale
When an Arizona real estate agent helped his parents purchase a distressed property from a motivated seller in 2012, he probably wasn’t thinking about bank fraud. In all likelihood, his main focus was on getting his parents a good deal on the property, which they bought for $580,000 in a ...
Predictive Analyst Names Two Picks for HQ2
Last year, New York University (NYU) marketing professor Scott Galloway predicted that Amazon would purchase Whole Foods. In June 2017, the internet behemoth did so. Now, Galloway has another big, Amazon-related prediction: “It all comes down to two locations [for HQ2]: It’s either going to be the metro area of ...
The Stock Market: What You Need to Know
Last week, Wall Street went a little crazy. After more than a year of steady growth, the time was certainly ripe for a correction in the market, and that is what the market gave investors last week. February started off with some turbulence, with the Dow closing on February 2, ...
Mortgage Lending: Buyers Simply Do Not Understand
While most Americans state they believe owning a home is part of the American Dream, only about eight percent of the population reports having the basic knowledge to figure out if they can afford a home and obtain conventional financing in order to make the purchase. Ally Financial recently surveyed ...
The state of Texas has 10 distinct climatic regions and 11 distinct ecological regions, so it’s hardly surprising that the second-largest state in the union boasts hundreds of distinct housing markets. In fact, it’s far more common to find regional analyses than a statewide real estate analysis of Texas simply ...
Mortgage Industry’s Bad News, Good News for Investors
When LoanLogic’s senior vice president of industry relations and consulting, Les Parker, starts blogging about volatility, it pays off for real estate investors to listen. “This year is shaping up as a year of volatility,” he observed, going on to predict that loan originations would plunge “as interest rates rise ...
The Time-Suck to Avoid at All Costs
No, it’s not Facebook. This time-suck is not even that two-hour lunch meeting or the team conferences that seem to invariably run over their designated 30, 60, or 90 minutes. It’s something far more insidious that is eating up your workday and decimating your productivity: the “gotta minute?” meeting. In ...
WSJ Stacks up HQ2 Cities with Some Disappointments
Last month, Amazon released its “short list” of 20 cities still in the running to host the web behemoth’s second headquarters, dubbed HQ2, which many analysts predict will revolutionize the winner’s local economy and turn an already thriving economy into a super-engine for growth. While all of the cities on ...
Las Vegas Lagging Behind in Home Appreciation
When Black Knight, Inc., released its most recent Home Price Index (HPI) Report, analysts immediately noted that 12 of the 40 largest U.S. metros hit new highs in home values by the end of 2017. That list included Boston, Massachusetts; Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dallas, Texas. Notably, it did not ...
Expert Warning: Private Lending Social Media Scam
LinkedIn is arguably the most “professional” of social media platforms and, as a result, many real estate investors doing due diligence look to the website to find out as much as possible about potential private lenders and investment partners before they team up. However, even LinkedIn has its weak points, ...
“The Worst Mistake Ever” Revealed to Texas Agent
Julie Ziglar Norman, a real estate agent with Dallas-based Prime Properties Realty and vice president of business development at Ziglar Inc., has seen a lot of things. The worst mistake she’s ever seen in real estate, however, nearly defies explanation. “I think the worst mistake I ever saw an investor ...
3 Actions to Start Self-Directing Your Retirement
“Most financial advisors will tell you that you simply cannot have a better lifestyle in retirement than you did while you were working full time. Most financial advisors are wrong.” So begins Edwin Kelly’s 60-minute training on exactly how real estate investors should begin self-directing their retirement. Kelly, CEO of ...
Free Yourself: Fuse Time, Tenants & Tech
Ask Linda Liberatore, the president of national property management company SecurePayOne, what the most important thing in life is, and she’ll answer without a second thought: time. “Time is our most important resource, our true wealth,” she explained. “You want to learn to take the breath, to step back and ...
