If you hear real estate agent say, "Open houses are obsolete," there's a good chance they’re doing it wrong. When executed correctly, open houses are a great way to generate new buyer and sellers leads, while getting to know members of your community. With most of real estate, you get what you put in and the same applies with open houses. If you want a successful open house, you’ll have to put in the time and work – but it will be worth it in the long run.

1. Step 1: Get a listing
2. Step 2: Promote the listing in that neighborhood
3. Step 3: Day of set up
4. Step 4: Attendees
5. Step 5: Post Open House

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the determining factors that drive traffic to your website. A search engine, such as Google or Bing!, will initiate crawling on your website to collect data about titles, keywords, images, links, meta tags and more. This information, along with other data will determine your website's ranking when someone performs a search. The more relevant and structured your content, the higher it will rank. SEO is like a sophisticated filing system – it’s easier to locate the most relevant information when it is structured and organized correctly.

For real estate, SEO is important for searches like listings, housing information, local events, blog articles, and more. It also helps you understand how people navigate to, through, and away from your website. This data will help you make decisions on which pages to invest more time and add more value, and which ones to get rid of.

Hot sheets are a catalog of listings in your MLS. Real estate agents should be leveraging hot sheets on their website to provide a better experience for their visitors. Generally, a “better experience” means being able to navigate to the information that they’re searching for using minimal clicks. You can use hot sheets for cities, neighborhoods, price, time on the market, and more.

As a real estate agent, how would you decompress after a stressful day? There are countless activities that you can do after a tense day of work but not all of them are constructive. Instant gratification activities such as drinking, smoking, over eating, shopping, and watching television can decrease stress, but they’re also detrimental to your health, your wallet, and your personal growth. You need to find a positive and constructive outlet. Some better alternatives are to clear your head of the problem or get your endorphins and dopamine flowing.

In this article, I will show you several constructive outlets to help you decompress after a stressful day of real estate. To maintain your personal growth, I’ll suggest positive ways for you to clear your head, blow off steam, and relax - instead of using instant gratification solutions.

Instagram is the perfect social media platform for residential real estate agents. You can display your listings through albums, showcase your personality through stories, and have full conversations with people through direct messages. These are useful features if Instagram is your hobby, but it's not a hobby for you.  Since it's an extension of your real estate business, you need to unlock Instagram’s full capabilities. Migrating will allow you to take advantage of features that drive traffic to your website and give you statistics on your followers, content, and more!

In this article, I will discuss three major benefits of having a business account: the ability to add a call-to-action to your profile, add a link to your highlight stories, and most importantly - insights. I’ll show you how to migrate to a business account and implement each of these features too!

In 2017, Katie Francis wrote to the producers of the Jimmy Fallon Show and asked if she could sell him her record-breaking 101,106th box of Girl Scout cookies. She was brought on and Fallon exchanged his $5 for a box of Samoas and a warm, “Thank you so much for your support.” Fallon let her keep the $1 change and to her surprise, gave her a $15,000 check made out to the Girl Scouts. While the average Girl Scout sells between 150 to 200 boxes of cookies a year, Katie averages 17,256 boxes - her record-breaking single-season total was 22,200 in 2015. Katie may not be a real estate agent but like most Girl Scouts, she implements a few best practices that you should adopt in your real estate business.

In this article, we will dive into the world of Girl Scout cookies and adapt their best practices by having good business sense, finding creative ways to reach your customers or leads, and being persistent.

If you’re looking for an article about St. Patrick’s Day, I have the perfect one for you: Engage Your Real Estate Leads with These 6 St. Paddy's Day Cards. But if you’re looking for ways to save money, reduce consumption, and help save the planet on St. Patrick’s Day (or any other day) - you’ve come to the right place! Evolving into an environmentally friendly business will help differentiate your real estate branding, strength your reputation, and build trust with leads. If a prospect is also environmentally conscious, they will be more likely to do business with you than an agent who is not. For them, it’s about hiring an agent that is like-minded and shares their goals – saving the planet.

In this article, we will review 4 ways real estate agents can go green by adopting environmentally friendly best practices. We will discuss post-consumer waste products, ways to reduce paper consumption, avoiding plastic and Styrofoam, and trading in purchasing an electric or hybrid automobile.

Time is your most valuable resource. It cannot be created but it can be lost; you can give your time, but you can’t receive it. Money, furniture, cars, clothes, and every other resource can be recovered once it’s lost, but time is irreplaceable. Since time is so valuable, it’s crucial for your success to manage it efficiently. 

In this article, I'll show you 5 tips to help manage your time and work more efficiently. You'll learn how to be more time conscious, utilize existing resources, leverage automation, when to outsource, and why you should avoid multitasking.

Real estate Facebook groups are an amazing tool to help farm your neighborhood and connect with your network on a more intimate level. Your goal is to build an online community with local members, serve those members by sharing valuable information, and position yourself as the neighborhood expert. You can share your local expertise, like recommendations, personal stories, neighborhood news, community events, and more. As your real estate Facebook group grows, it will evolve into one of your primary tools for generating referral leads.

In this article, we will review the benefits of having your own real estate Facebook group, offer set up tips, and tricks to managing your real estate Facebook group. You'll use these tips and tricks as a guide to establish yourself as the neighborhood expert within your group.

This time of year, the streets of the French Quarter change from a bleak concrete street to a flowing purple, yellow, and green river of anxious festival goers. The golden sun peaks over the skyline, illuminating the buildings with a golden filter as if King Midas were attending the celebration himself. Today is Fat Tuesday, which means today is the last day of Mardi Gras.

Have you ever dreamed of what it would be like to live in the French Quarter? To not only be a participant, but a host?  In this article, we will go over the top listings in the French Quarter to see what it takes to be a host that contributes to New Orleans's most renowned event - Mardi Gras!