Showing posts with label listing. Show all posts

3 Agents Have Been - Now which one do I Choose?

Which Agent Should I Choose?

Choosing the right real estate agent to sell your house can be an overwhelming prospect. Deciding to sell is a big step in itself, and selecting the right person to take on the challenge with you can be tough. Most consumers will meet with a few different agents before making a decision about which person to entrust the job to, but after the agents have done their ‘pitch’ and headed home, who do you choose?

They All seemed to make sense

Each contender was probably equally friendly and professional, albeit overly extroverted and a little pushy as sales people tend to be, but no matter how ‘nice’, ultimately you know that they’re trying to sell you something - themselves! - which can make it difficult to trust your gut.

Do you pick the down-to-earth agent with the realistic price and fair, reasoned approach? Should you pick the one with the lowest commission fees, or instead choose the agent who promised to get you your asking price? Maybe you should take a leap of faith with the guy who promised to sell for more, even though he could be too good to be true.

Head or Heart

Whether the agent is pitching their years of experience, promising to get you exactly the price you’re asking for, or ‘buying the listing’ by offering more than they expect to get in the long-run, sometimes you have to ask yourself “can I trust my instincts?” especially when it comes to hiring a master salesperson.

It helps to arm yourself with as much information as possible, and there’s plenty of it out there once you know what you’re looking for, but even if you know everything you need to know about the market, it’s ultimately the agent’s experience and attitude that will play the biggest role in determining the outcome of your sale.

Most Salespeople are hard-working

There are many dedicated, hard-working, ethical and compassionate people working in the industry, that’s for sure, but there is also no doubt that real estate agents have a reputation for insincerity. In an industry motivated largely by commissions it’s easy to understand why. One particularly surprising thing about the commission structure of the industry is that although it feels like something that will work in your favour, in actual fact, that isn't always the case.

According to Steven Levitt and Stephen Lubner, authors of Freakonomics (www.freakonomics.com) it is actually more profitable for an estate agent to sell your house sooner, for less money, than to hold out for a higher price.

It’s counter intuitive, but the math holds out; if your agent gets a 3% commission on your $300,000 home they will walk away with a $9000 cheque in their hand.

But 3% of $310,000 is only an additional $300, so if the higher offer takes an additional 14 days to come through, that’s only an extra $21.50 each day for the agent. While holding out would work out to be an almost $10,000 benefit to the seller, the agent is actually better off selling the house for the lower bid rather than investing any more of their time.

Maybe an Independent 3rd Party

That’s just one of the reasons why savvy consumers are seeking out an objective third party who can help them make a clear headed decision about their choices. Getting an independent property appraisal from a property coach who will make no money from the transaction is the best way to guarantee yourself an honest opinion about the state of your property and what to expect over the course of the sale.

A property coach isn’t an agent, and doesn’t sell property or arrange financing, but with years of experience in all types of property transactions they know the best in the business who do, and can offer you invaluable, unbiased, independent advice about every aspect of the selling process.

Taking the time to talk to a property coach could save you a small fortune, not to mention help you make the best decision when it comes to choosing an agent.

www.mypropertycoach.com.au

Welcome to mypropertycoach.com.au

Part of the BVP Group Australia

mypropertycoach.com.au

was founded to revolutionise the property industry by helping everyday Australians realise their dreams of wealth through property investment.

What makes us unique is the fact that we provide 100% unbiased professional property advice.

Every client is assured that our primary focus is on their needs and helping them find effective solutions to their property investment questions and concerns.

Visit mypropertycoach.com.au for more details on how mypropertycoach.com.au can teach you how to build Wealth through Property.

Coaching - Australia's Second Fastest Growing Industry

Australia's Latest Growth Industry: Personal Service Coaching

As life becomes increasingly complicated in a world with tough economic conditions most people experience an increased amount of stress in some form.

People who want to perform better at their jobs and improve their quality of life are employing personal lifestyle and business coaches.

Personal service coaches establish a dynamic and highly interactive relationship with their clients to work toward solving the broad range of life and work-related issues that might impede the client's success.

Recession Proof

When coaching first gained a foothold in the early 2000s, analysts questioned whether the concept would remain viable in the long-term, or if it was just a vanity service that people would view as expendable in periods of economic contraction.

This question was answered during the 2008 Global Economic Crisis when people and businesses not only chose to continuing working with their coaches, but business leaders and other individuals who had not previously used coaches also opted to try this service to improve their productivity and competitive edge in both life and business. As a result, personal service coaching not only remained stable during the economic downturn, but also grew as an industry as more forward thinking individuals and businesses used these services to gain a competitive edge.

Coaching Today

Today, personal service coaching in Australia is the second fasted growing industry after the Information Technology sector.

Lifestyle and business coaching generate roughly $ 2 billion in revenue on an annual basis.

The outlook for this high growth industry remains strong, as both individuals and business find that they receive as much as a 50:1 return on their investment. (ie. $50 return for every $1 spent on coaches / mentors)

Individuals find they are able to find new career opportunities more quickly than they were able to before they worked with a coach. Additionally, they find that they are happier, less stressed, make better decisions, and have more fulfilling personal and business relationships than they did before they hired a personal service coach.

Business leaders, entrepreneurs, and small business owners find that they are able to recruit better talent, have less employee turnover, and are able to develop and execute more effective and innovative strategic plans when they work with a business coach.

Lifestyle and Business Coaching

According to the International Coaching Federation, professional lifestyle and business coaches offer a unique service that focuses on working with a client to establish goals, creating desired outcomes, and implementing strategies to manage and enhance the personal change the person has achieved.

According to the Worldwide Association of Business Coaches, the process of lifestyle and business coaching entails the following steps:

1. Initial Meetings

During this first meeting, the coach will meet with the client to determine the client's goals, to determine what obstacles prevent the client from achieving these aspuirations, to define the roles of the coach and client, andto make clear the responsibilities of each person in this dynamic relationship. During these first two initial meetings, the coach works to establish trust and an atmosphere of safety and both coach and client make a mutual commitment to honesty. These sessions also involve the coach offering support as well as high value feedback. Additionally, the coach might start to challenge the client about negative habits and patterns of thinking that can impede the client's progress toward desired goals.

At the end of this step, a formal contract is presented to the client that defines the coaching process, the role of the coach and the client, and the responsibilities of each party. Additionally, the client and coach will also sign a separate confidentiality agreement.

2. Compiling Information and Debriefing

People live in a variety of complex systems. Together, the coach and client will work to assess and define each system in which the client operates on a regular basis. For lifestyle coaches, this might entail exploring the client's relationships with a significant other, family, friends, and colleagues, as well as how the client handles his or her career and personal finances. For business coaches, this might entail reviewing the structure, vision, and mission of the business in which the client is involved, the client's personnel file, as well as other documentation that can provide insight into the person's business environment and the manner in which the client functions in this climate.

With the permission of the client, the coach might gather information from people with whom the client interacts. The coach will directly observe the client in a variety of contexts. This will provide the coach with insight into the manner in which the client handles a number of situations so that the coach can develop strategies.

Additionally, the coach might employ a variety of assessment tools to provide further insight into the person's thoughts and behaviours that affect their daily performance.

3. Feedback

The coach will provide their client with the coach's impressions about the way in which the client performed in each situation the coach observed.

4. Planning and Coaching

Based upon the client's baseline level of functioning, the coach and client can develop goals and benchmarks along with strategies to help the client can use to overcome the challenges they face in achieving these goals. The interventions and strategies are experiential actions that take place in real world situations.

5. Reassessment

At a time specified in the coaching agreement, the client and coach will revisit the initial assessment to evaluate the progress that has been made during the months of active coaching. Based upon this assessment, the client and coach can determine what goals the client has achieved, the need for additional goals and benchmarks, and means to reinforce the positive changes that the client has made.

6. Final Assessment

At the end of the coaching services, the coach and client will meet to evaluate the progress that has been made by the client. The coach will point of how the behavioural change the client has made has improved his quality of life or his or her performance in the business world. Prior to this meeting, with the permission of the client, the coach might re-interview the people whom he or she initially interviewed to determine the impressions of significant others in the client life about the changes the client has made. The coach and client will develop a plan that the client can use for continued change and growth.

Since personal service coaching is involves intensive individualised investment of a considerable amount of time, it is easy to how both individuals and businesses can spend thousands of dollars on personal service coaching. Fortunately, this coaching service is tax deductible so that those who invest in coaching haveanother source of investment deduction.

Demographics

Those who opt to use lifestyle and business coaches tend to be people who have already achieved a certain degree of success in their life and business ventures and who want to achieve the next level of achievement. They tend to be self-motivated professionals in their 30s to 50s who are in the upper middle class to upper class socio-economic groups. Some examples of people who opt for lifestyle and business personal serving coaching include Chief Executive Officers and directors of major corporations, entrepreneurs, and those who achieved a high level of success in their business life who want to find the same level of fulfillment in other areas of their lives. According to the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development, large corporations have started to employ business coaches for their front line employees in order to increase productivity and decrease turnover.

The Benefits of Lifestyle and Business Coaching

Some of the benefits of lifestyle and business include the following
* Help establish and implement strategies to overcome barriers in both personal and business situation
* Rejuvenate both personal and business growth
* Build interpersonal confidence and competencies
* Learn new skills and refine old ones

The Future of Lifestyle and Business Coaching

Just as personal athletic trainers started as independent contractors who then found that in order to meet demand, they needed to join forces and open gyms that later turned into franchises, the future of personal service coaching appears to be moving in the same direction. Think of how Gold' Gym in the United States that started as a small neighbourhood gym for weight builders transformed into a national franchise of gyms that cater to the fitness needs of casual fitness enthusiasts as well as those who are training for competition.

Rationalisation

Currently, the lifestyle and fitness coaching industry is highly fragmented as most coaches offer their services as independent contractors. In order to meet demand, personal lifestyle coaches will start to join forces and those who are most effective will begin to start franchises. As these initial start-ups gain a foothold, the industry is forecasted to evolve into multi-service franchise organisations offering personal service coaching services under a single corporation. As corporations become established and the lifestyle franchises gain brand recognition with the public, it will be much more difficult for independent lifestyle coaches and small groups of coaches to remain viable or to transform their business into a franchise. The reason for this difficulty is it will be much more difficult for new franchises to gain the brand recognition and clientele, as they will be competing against a known established brand.

For venture capitalists and investors, lifestyle coaching franchises offer the opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a new industry with solid long-term growth potential

Meet The Aurthor

Antonio Santolo is the founder and CEO of My Property Coach, a professional real estate coaching company that provides honest and reliable property investment advice. He has more than 20 years of experience in all areas of the real estate market, and provides expert property coaching advice to clients interested in property investment. Santolo specializes in both residential and commercial property, and helps his clients invest properly in real estate to maximize their investment potential. His years of experience in both investment strategies and real estate have provided him with the leadership skills and knowledge necessary to coach others on how to realize their own financial freedom through strategic property investments. Santolo also shares his real estate expertise as a freelance property author, and has experience in property case conflict, arbitration and resolution

Contact info@mypropertycoach.com.au

Impact of Global Crisis now being felt in Australian Property

Australia has weathered the recent global financial crisis better than most countries. Thanks to a more stringent set of banking laws, it did not experience the same sub-prime issues that other nations did. As a result it had one of the strongest economies in the world after the crisis began. However, the average Australian has seen relatively little benefit from this, due to a quickly rising cost of living. In a relatively short period of time, Australia has become more expensive to live in than almost any other country. Living in Australian cities is now less affordable than even New York, London, or Singapore are. This is having a significant negative impact on many first time home buyers.

The Rising Cost of Living in Australia

Sydney is now the sixth most expensive city to live in out of all the countries in the world. Even though the Australian dollar has nearly doubled in value relative to the US dollar between 2002 and 2011, the purchasing power of the average Australian has not increased at all. The price of imported goods has not been significantly reduced as a result. Over this same period, the Consumer Price Index rose by a whopping 28 percent. The average Australian home owner spends 45 percent of his or her income after taxes just in paying off debts. One in five first time Australian home owners spends more than half of his or her income paying off debt. This is a significantly higher level of debt than that carried by citizens of most other developed countries. The citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, India, and Mexico had an average of 38 percent of their income spent on debt.

The Rising Cost of Housing in Australia

In the 1980, an average house cost three times the median family income, which is considered to be an affordable level. Today, the average house costs nine times the median family income, which is not very affordable. Interest rates have been rising as well, making mortgage payments higher and more difficult to meet. Mortgage payments now account for over 27 percent of the total household income. As of 2010, more than 40 percent of all first time home buyers were having some degree of difficulty paying their mortgages. In other words, housing costs are skyrocketing at the same time that it is becoming more difficult for Australians to purchase food, fuel, and all of the other necessities of living. This is counterintuitive, as Australia's abundance of land should mean that housing prices are amongst the lowest in the world. Nor is the government able to do much to ameliorate this situation. There is very little public housing available, the government only provides 1.4 percent of Australia's total housing property, and is loath to build large amounts of additional housing for fear of negatively impacting existing house prices and causing economic instability.

The Effect on First Time Home Buyers

This has radically changed the home buying landscape in Australia. In the 1970s, the average age of a first time home buyer was 25. Today, it is 31. Many young people are now finding home ownership to be entirely out of reach, and are having to settle for either renting, or continuing to live with their parents. In a recent survey of members of the youngest generation, Generation Y, one out of three respondents replied that they did not believe that they would ever be able to afford a home of their own when asked. Generation Y may be shaping up to become the first "homeless generation." This kind of radical change in living patterns would have repercussions across almost every facet of Australian life.

Home Ownership and Dynastic Wealth

This pessimistic housing outlook may spur some "Mum and Dad investors" into thinking that they should play it safe, and wait to see how the global financial crisis plays out before making a move. This kind of fear can be the wrong reaction, though. Many of the biggest fortunes were made during recessions and even during depressions, and the perennial wisdom that "there is security in land" is as true as ever. Now is the time for Mum and Dad investors to buy a home because no matter what happens with the economy, that home offers significant long term profit of one kind or another. With prices and interest rates going up, it is better to buy a home sooner rather than later. If the economy rebounds after the recession in the same way that it has tended to historically, then this home will have been a good investment financially. Even if the economy does not rebound, then parental investors will still have gained in another important way. They'll have created dynastic wealth, something that will be passed on to their children and their childrens children

Mum and Dad investors putting their money into buying a home are helping subsequent generations to have a better standard of living, a substantial investment in the family's future. As with many economic downturns in the past, the present situation presents an opportunity for those who look toward the long term when assessing their investment opportunities.

From The Author

Many clients tell us that My Property Coach .com.au made them feel comfortable and put their mind at ease enough to decide to start the path to create dynastic wealth for themselves and future generations.

Knowledge is power and having the experience and expertise of Australia’s leading property professionals is essential to have your investments and your families future on solid foundations, it is never too early to start, however it will too late one day....

You will be pleasantly surprised how little it costs to engage a Property Coach and start living your life to the fullest. Imagine the security knowing you have things covered and are maximising every opportunity to build wealth all without risking all of your hard earned assets.

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“We listen to what you want, understand your needs, make you feel at ease and help create wealth through smart property investing......” Antonio Sawlwin Santolo