You may have heard horror stories about REALTORS® but do not believe everything you hear, in most cases it turns out to be nothing but a myth. Your REALTOR® is hired by you with a signed representation agreement which states fiduciary duties, obligations, and rights for each party.

A professional REALTOR® seeks to perform at the highest ethical standards in order to gain a client for life, not a transaction. Here are some common myths that need to be addressed about our San Antonio REALTORS®

Myth: REALTORS® are never on time for appointments.

Truth: REALTORS® are professionals and always schedule client meetings in order to dedicate their time for each client. We do not rush our clients when we meet with them and care in scheduling is always taken into consideration.

Myth: REALTORS® don’t like to show homes they have listed for sale.

Fact: A REALTOR® has a fiduciary duty to their clients, which includes buyer and seller representation. Even if you are not represented by a REALTOR®, the listing agent should be happy to show you this specific property since they are doing what is best for their client, the seller.

Myth: Your real estate agent will do anything you ask of them, especially if it involves commission.

Fact: REALTORS® are bound by a Code of Ethics and are subject to penalties, fines, and even legal consequences that may include suspension or revocation of license, even jail or prison convictions. If it is illegal or unethical, a professional REALTOR® should decline and even terminate the business relationship.

Myth: REALTORS® make a lot of money from commission.

Truth: The majority of REALTOR®/BROKER relationships require that the broker take a certain percentage of the agent’s commission since the broker is sponsoring the agent’s license. Do not assume that the REALTOR® keeps 100% of the commission, in fact, errors and omissions insurance is often paid to the broker along with the agreed broker’s cut.

By: Liz Voss

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A good Real Estate website is incomplete without proper Real Estate Listings. The website would do very little to educate and inform the visitor. Listings for Real Estate not only attract visitors but also enable the website to grab their attention. Listings are rather the “real” thing a visitor wants to see in a site.

Always keep in mind that these listings should be up to date. We know Real Estate agents love seeing “Sold” on every property, but people who would be visiting your website would end up losing heart. Updating your website regularly is a must to keep your visitors coming back. Make sure your listings are in proper price order. It is essential that you have devised ways for them to search through the properties and kept it simple to use.

Interested property buyers tend to check back to your website every week, in the hope of finding fresh properties. You have to ensure that New Real Estate Listings are put up on a regular basis, to aid your customers in making a better decision. To prevent losing business, make sure that someone is made responsible for uploading New Real Estate Listings on your website and keeping the old ones up-to-date.

Depending on the program used to manage the listings section, it might require some extra training to make sure that these updates are made as quickly and efficiently as possible. An investment in professional practices is a wise decision and will prove to be fruitful. Most Real Estate Marketing websites believe in making making worthwhile websites for their customers. The websites that are built also have automatic property alerts that send out new listings via email every day to prospective customers.

While putting down Listings for Real Estate, it’s always a good idea to mark them separately for Commercial Real Estate Listings and the Residential ones. This can help new agents get off to a good start and can work as a new beginning for veteran agents who have been around for a while. Remember, the higher the number of your listings, the better your chances of selling.

By keeping these points in mind, you should be able to communicate about your real estate site better. You also need to ensure that you are able to project a professional image online, increasing your marketing reach and your bottom line.

By: Megha Monga

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Real Estate commissions are service charges that a property agent or broker charge for assisting you in buying, selling or renting a property, and that’s the main source of their income. Normally, a real estate agent will talk of these commission rates as a fixed percentage of the whole amount. In reality, these commission rates are not fixed and you can (in fact you should) negotiate and reach a deal before you finally hire an agent. To know what the average commission rate is in the market, you must consult a number of property agents and compare their services because at times real estate agents refuse to offer some specific services, when they are working on a reduced commission rate. Therefore, when you’re fixing the commission, you should ask the agent to provide you with a list of services that you can expect to get in this fee.

Do you really need a real estate agent?

Even before you go out searching for a property agent, make sure you really need one. For example, if you are hiring them solely for property search or you want them to show you available homes for sale or rent, you can easily do it yourself, as a number of websites now offer free property listings for almost all cities in the world. You can just search for the property with your required specification and contact the property owner directly. Similarly, if you are looking for an agent to sell your property, you can try doing it yourself by placing an ad in those property portals. That doesn’t imply that property agents are of no use, it’s just that you don’t always need to hire a full-service agent all the time.

Normally real estate agents ask for a specific percentage as their commission; however there are companies who demand a flat rate. You can make a choice between both of these options if you’ve got a clear idea of the amount that will be involved. Do not make huge upfront payments or you’ll be stuck with that agent for a long time even if he/she fails to deliver, and always check for the property license issued by the concerned authorities before making any sort of payment. The situation of the market also affects the rate of commission, if the market is slow then you may get a property agent at lower commission rates, if there are lots of transactions taking place, you may find it hard to hire an experienced real estate agent at low rates.

By: William King

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Real estate agent is sort of broking job. A real estate agent should work out a deal for a property sale between a prospective buyer and a prospective seller. It can be a job of high earning potential. But the real estate agent should work hard to achieve that. A lot of real estate agents work as consultants. It may not be their full-time job. This can be done during the free time of another full-time job. But such juggling of jobs needs high-energy quotient and expertise in time management. Since it is not a full-time job, there is no fixed salary. The real estate agent gets a fixed percent of total amount of land sale from both the buyer and the seller.

There is absolutely no limit for the salary of a real estate agent, when working as freelance consultant. As they say in advertisements, sky is the limit for the salary of land brokers. The harder one works and more sales one engineers, the more will be the money one earns. But for earning a good monthly income, the freelance real estate agents should be highly industrious and have good inter-personal communication skills. In general, real estate agents should be well versed with the value of a property. They should be able to do a quick valuation of the property and should be able to explain the aspects that influence the price of the property and convince both parties about a reasonable price.

There are plenty of real estate firms and agencies that employ real estate agents. In such firms, the agents have a fixed monthly salary. The salary varies from agency to agency. Usually it depends on the volume of business done by the agency. There are some agencies that provide a pay based on the number of real estate sales materialized by a particular employee. In general, the annual salary of a real estate agent, who works in any of the established firms, varies from $25000 to $75000. There are a minority of real estate agents who earn a salary even less than $25000. Some agents working in start-up companies only earn an annual salary of only $10000. Such a large variation of salary can be explained by the fact that some real estate agencies have more business volume than some of smaller fish in the real estate fray.

Also the commission-wise salary and sales-wise salary affect the annual pay. There are some months, especially in the winter months of November, December and January, in which conventionally real estate business are somewhat fewer. So in the case sales-wise salary structure, the salary suffers a dip in those months. But the sales move up from March to September. So will be the salary in those months.

By: Ian Pennington

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Real Estate

The real estate industry offers some of the most lucrative employment opportunities in Dubai and the UAE at large. Dubai Real Estate Institute (DREI) is the first institute offering real estate studies in the Middle East. Located at the real estate hub of the region, the institute aims to cater to the growing need for professional competence in the property sector of the region.

In partnership with world-renowned universities offering programmes in real estate studies, DREI has a mission to deliver world-class education in the region. The first of its kind academic institute of the region offering real estate studies, Dubai Real Estate Institute (DREI) has recently completed its programmes slated for November. The said programmes are:

o Successful Real Estate Development

o International Real Estate Investment

o Real Estate as Investment Assets

The three courses were meant for managers of all levels, senior managers and middle level managers respectively. The first batch was attended by professionals from renowned names in Dubai real estate sector: Nakheel, Dubai Properties, Dubai Islamic Bank and Sama Dubai.

The institute is coming up with new courses for the session beginning in 2008. These include:

o Effective Real Estate Marketing

o Managing Real Estate Development Projects

o Value Engineering

o Financing Infrastructure

o Successful Real Estate Development

o Masters degree in Sustainable Real Estate Development

The programs offered by Dubai Real Estate Institute (DREI) provide adequate knowledge base, skill-set and analytical enhancement to real estate professionals.

Partners of Dubai Real Estate Institute:

o Reading University, UK

o National University of Singapore

By: Jasdeep Kaur

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Real estate became the subject matter of analysis for two reasons. Firstly, while studying the effects of mass effort, it was found necessary to study stimuli provided by the media. These stimuli come in the form of the content. Secondly, on the part of the media professionals and also media researchers there in need to understand the appeal of the content i.e. the strength of the message and its nature. Thus these need to be studied. This has to be studied more from the point of view of the audiences.

Both the above-mentioned reasons have practical basic form the point of view of mass communication and they gradually expanded to embrace many related issues as well. Early study of content dealt with mainly dealt with mainly the informational content of news. Now the portrayal of various real estate issues use of media as propaganda, and minority and caste biases in media have become the subject of study for content analysis.

Most of the Moorpark Real Estate researcher has decided the objective of the research in the concerned field; the second step is to identify the units of analysis. While doing the content analysis of a newspaper the news items, articles, feature and editorial, photographs, etc. can be the units of analysis. While studying the portrayal sex may be the units of analysis.

Words, sentences, paragraphs, pages can also be the units of analysis. Similarly programmers on radio and television can also be units of analysis. The units of analysis depend upon the nature of investigation that is being carried out.

The next step is to decide the categories of analysis. For example, while doing a content analysis study of the dateline of the news stories of a newspaper the categories can be: national, capital, state capitals, and other metropolitan cities, big cities, district headquarters, towns, villages, capitals of foreign countries.

Similarly, in the same study UNI, PTI, Reuters, Correspondent, Staff reporter, stringer, or combination of these may be the categories of analysis. While doing the content analysis of television programmers, news, current affairs, chat shows, countdown programmers, films, film based programmers, science programmers, etc. can be the categories.

While analyzing the objectivity of news items the categories can be fully balance, party balanced, not balanced, etc. can be categories of analysis. The units of analysis are given symbols either in the form of alphabets or numeral. This information, the units, the categories of analysis and the symbol given to them are organized in a systematic manner in the form of a code book. The real estates code book is a reference document, which is standardized for a given study and used uniformly by all researchers at the stage of coding and tabulation.

By: Jenie Wills

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Chicago is one of the liveliest and the busiest cities in the US because of its location. It is located close to Mississippi River and Lake Michigan, making it a hub for transportation. The city is located in the Midwest which makes it a natural gateway between the East and the West Coast. Because of its geographical location, the city has also become an important trade center and it is not surprising that thousands of people are considering making the city their home. It presents business opportunities, diversity and a lot of different entertainment options, making it a wise choice for settling down.

The Real Estate Market in Chicago

Fortunately, for those who are considering making Chicago their home, the real estate market is varied and plentiful as so many people move to the city every year. The city has a wide variety of single family homes, apartments, townhouses and condos to choose from. There are also plenty of opportunities for those who are interested in purchasing empty land.

All being said, real estate in Chicago is by no means cheap. The rentals in the city are quite high while purchasing an apartment or a house in the good neighborhoods can really burn a hole in the pocket. The downtown area of Chicago is The Loop which is the hub of all the activities. The neighborhoods which are close to downtown are the costliest when it comes to real estate in Chicago. Most people fall in love with The Loop the moment they visit it and dream about finding a house close to it. However, the rates are too high and unless help is taken from a trusted and knowledgeable real estate agency the chances are that finding a property would be impossible.

Neighborhoods in Chicago

For those who are looking for affordable housing options, the South Side has the most affordable options in real estate in Chicago. The neighborhoods in South Side cover as much as 60% of the total area of the city and thus there are plenty of different options to choose from. Chicago’s West side too is a great place to start house hunting since the properties there are a little cheaper.

The north side of the city is known for its harbors, beaches and parks and is the most serene and beautiful locations in the city. This part of the city has some of the nicest apartments and houses. However, there is a huge demand for properties in this area because of which the rates too are quite high.

Those who are planning to make Chicago their home would have to spend some time evaluating all the properties and considering their options. Consider the place of work since living in the suburbs of the city would mean longer commutes though the property rates would be affordable. However, the city does have many modes of public transportation available which makes commuting a little easier. Choose a realtor wisely and look at as many options as you can before you make a decision.

By: Ricardo Lumbardo

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