The Certified Negotiation Expert courses that I’ve previously featured in my blog are now going to be offered at another level higher!

Meet the MCNE (Master Certified Negotiation Expert) designation, a series of courses that guide you into becoming a Master Negotiator!

The classes are on our calendar throughout the year and in multiple Colorado locations, taught by Oliver Frascona and Bruce Dunning.

Prerequisites?

A lot of agents have already taken the 2-day CNE courses in the past, and that’s a great foundation for continuing to the rest of the MCNE work.

However, although the CNE is required in order to complete the MCNE certification, it doesn’t have to be taken as the first course. It’s still strongly recommended as it makes for good preparation.

Required Courses

• Certified Negotiation Expert (2 days)
  • The original core course in negotiation
• Mastering Email Negotiations in Real Estate (1 day)
  • Knowing when its acceptable or advisable to utilize written mediums for negotiation purposes, and how to overcome the lack of visual and audio cues that are normally present in face-to-face communication
• Advanced Negotiation Techniques for Buyer’s Agents (1 day)
  • Help your buyers devise an effective negotiation plan, and then enact it on their behalf regardless of the transaction’s particular challenges!
• Advanced Negotiation Techniques for Listing Agents (1 day)
  • Understand the unique emotional barriers that may arise for sellers, and employ effective persuasion and negotiation both WITH your sellers and FOR your sellers.
• Negotiating Across Generations in Real Estate (3 hours)
  • A course created at the request of previous CNE graduates to help agents understand the needs and differences of each generation that may be involved in a transaction.
• Cultural Factors in Real Estate Negotiations (3 hours)
  • From the RENI Website:  Students will leave this course with an understanding of aggressive cultural negotiation tactics and how to deal effectively with negotiators who use these tactics.

Benefits of the Training

The MCNE courses give you some serious and powerful in-depth tools for many of the unique negotiation opportunities that arise in the real estate industry.

For instance, negotiation through email and electronic communication channels can be complicated for those agents who rely heavily on face-to-face, nonverbal cues such as body language and facial expression. If that’s you, this certification will prepare you to proceed with confidence in remote negotiation sessions.

Also, with baby-boomers frequently downsizing and new homebuyers coming in from the ranks of young families, wouldn’t it be great to have a handle on the complexities of cross-generational negotiating? Well, this certification gives you that edge as well!

Ready to take your own negotiation skills to the next level? Come check out our calendar for the time and location that works for you! Start knocking out those MCNE courses now.

Home Equity Conversion Mortgages
Starting April 1, FHA is consolidating its standard fixed-rate home equity conversion mortgage and its Saver fixed-rate HECM into one. While the standard option is the most popular, it’s putting stress on the FHA insurance fund. For long-term sustainability, the saver option will be the only one available.

Mortgage insurance premiums
The FHA will raise premiums on new mortgages to by 10 basis points or by 0.10 percent. On jumbo loans, the rates will increase 0.05 percent.

Jumbo down payment
The FHA is also increased the required down payment on loans greater than $625,000 from 3.5 percent to 5 percent.

See HUD memo No. 13-010

Wile it’s always important to stay on top of your continuing education credits and courses, the Colorado Division of Real Estate has been conducting random audits to ensure all Realtors and mortgage brokers are up to date and in compliance with continuing education courses.

The newsletter is filled with good information about changes in regulations and new course options. Click here to download it.

The key to good marketing for a Realtor is creating a brand – your brand ­– and making it stand out recognizably against the crowd.

As homebuyers turn more and more to the Internet when considering real estate, it’s key for Realtors to have a strong online brand.

Here are a few tips to help you build brand awareness and distinguish yourself and your services.

First: Develop a valuable website

Establishing a personal professional website is an essential step in developing your brand. It gives you platform to tell potential clients about yourself, your experience and your values.

Don’t miss out on an opportunity to tell clients and potential clients exactly what you want them to know.

A website is also a good place to market your product. Showcase featured properties on your site and draw clients in with useful information about the local real estate market.

Second,Use social media smartly

It’s one thing to have a facebook page. It’s something else entirely to use facebook as a marketing tool. Make sure you have a professional facebook page, complete with your logo and professional photos of yourself.

Target your market and visit the facebook pages your future clients use. Make comments and offer helpful advise when you can. But don’t overdo it.

Include the community. Like facebook pages for local businesses in the areas where you do the most business. Follow those businesses and attend their events.

Draw clients in with contests and sweepstakes. If your company is offering any giveaways, link to them and encourage clients to take advantage of the opportunities.

Share useful content from your company or even local media that highlight local trends or interesting information about the market or your brand.

Third, use email respectfully

Don’t send out too many emails. They get lost and people unsubscribe from your list. But a monthly newsletter filled with useful information about the neighborhoods you work in and the current real estate market can be relevant to possible new clients and to your existing client base.

Reaching out to existing clients with useful and interesting information reminds them of you and their fondness for you. That will make them more likely to refer you to friends.

Finally, don’t forget to leave the computer

Use the Internet to find your way to valuable networking events. As much as the Internet has become the lynchpin of real estate searches, people still want to meet their agents in person before they sign on.

And don’t forget to include links to your website on everything you post. That way people can find their way to you and contact you directly with questions.

On Oct. 2, 2012, The Colorado Real Estate Commission adopted changes to Rule B-2, Methods of completing continuing education. The revised rule replaces the “Broker Transition”course with the newly developed 24-hour “Broker Reactivation”course. Starting, Jan. 1, 2013, Licensees returning to active status from inactive or expired status will be encouraged to take the new “Broker Reactivation” course if they are unable to satisfy the education requirements found in B-2(a).

Additionally, the rule removes the “Broker Administration” course as a method of satisfying the continuing education requirements.The “Broker Administration” course is still required to upgrade a license from the Associate Broker level, and can qualify as 24 hours of elective continuing education. It will not satisfy any portion of the Annual Commission Update course requirements.

The rule is effective Jan. 1, 2013 and all licensees will have to comply with the new requirements. The Division will honor all courses under the current requirements of B-2 completed by Dec. 31, 2012.

*This information was provided to you from Educated Minds LLC, your resource for continuing education! Please visit our CALENDAR for upcoming class locations.

Our real estate market has done an about face in the past few months. Real estate agents had grown accustomed to long listing periods and tough negotiations as buyers took advantage of a market that was definitely in their favor.  With the markets dramatic shift to a sellers market many real estate professionals have been caught off guard when not one, but two or three offers are presented within days.

Realtors(R) are wondering “how do I help my seller choose the right contract when presented multiple offers?” and “how do I help sellers negotiate for the best price and terms?”.  Additionally, where more than one buyer is very interested, and with the restrictions in the mortgage industry, how can real estate brokers negotiate a backup offer?

There’s no doubt, for agents to properly advise and protect their sellers, education is in order!  Oliver Frascona, a locally renowned instructor and real estate attorney, presents to agents new and affectieve strategy using real-world examples and plenty of humor! The time to get educated is BEFORE you encounter a multiple offer situation.

After attending this three-hour course on Multiple Offer Stategy you will understand:

• How to handle multiple offers on a property
• What is a first right of refusal and how they affect your marketing, communications and incoming offers
• How to accept a backup offer and use it to your seller’s advantage
• Multiple contracts
• Understanding the dangers of lease/option contracts

To find the next available Multiple Offer Strategy course in your area, Click Here.

A couple of articles from DSNews have caught my eye this year. They involve heavy predictions of ends to the housing crisis and a dramatic improvement in housing prices.

The first article, Housing Crisis to End in 2012 as Banks Loosen Credit Standards, is titled a bit grandiosely for certain. But it would be wonderful to believe that their predictions could be true! I have no problems with the data they quote. It’s great to see that:

* The average credit score for lending has stabilized at 700
* Banks are lending up to 3.5 times earnings (up from during the worst of the crisis)
* Loan-to-value ratios are up from 74% to a much more attractive 82% LTV

The sources of the data include the analytics firm Capital Economics and the Fed Senior Loan Officer Survey.

Other Good News — Prices May Finally Begin to Recover

Yep, this is the other “yeehaw!” we can look forward to if DSNews and other real estate sources can be believed. We’ve seen for certain that here in the Denver area, inventory has taken a sharp decline recently. That’s brought on a lot of predictions that prices will take an upswing due to the simple and powerful laws of supply and demand.

Another indication that the doom-and-gloomers may have been wrong that housing prices would fall farther before climbing back up is addressed in the article Forecasting Home Price Recovery: Turnover Rate as a Powerful Indicator.

In short, the data on turnover rates would seem to indicate that savvy investors both at home and abroad have jumped on the low prices quickly enough in many markets to cut short any further drops and will actually spark a recovery!

The authors of these articles made sure to point out that outside factors could at any moment cut in and change the housing market recovery dramatically, but let’s keep a focus on the potential in their analyses and all take a little ride on that ‘silver lining’ for now!

According to the latest market research from The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, adults in the US are more and more dependent on their cell phones (especially smartphones), for the web browsing activities they used to perform on their laptops.

Consider the following statistics:

• In 2011, 84% of adults have a cell phone
• 1/3 of these are smartphone users
• Smartphone users are highest in the 18-49 year old age bracket
• Smartphone users are highest in the $75k+ household income range

Doesn’t this sound just like your target demographic? Gen Yers and baby boomers are overwhelmingly trending toward dependence on their mobile phones for their internet activity. That activity includes property searching!

Along with smart phones come a host of applications for just about any purpose under the sun. Some of the real estate specific apps that are leading the way are available from organizations and businesses such as Trulia, the National Association of REALTORS (NAR) and even locally-adapted customized apps from individual brokerages.

As we look at what the growing adoption of smart phones and mobile technology means for your business, it’s a good time to ask yourself a few key questions.

1. Are all of your listings optimized for internet searching, which is a highly visual medium? Do you have professional quality photos, video tours and complete listing data included with every property?
2. Is your individual website compatible with mobile browsers? For instance, sites developed with Flash may have difficulty displaying on certain smartphones.
3. Have you adopted the use of text messaging for sending property data or for keeping in touch with your clients?
4. Do you have a plan for keeping up-to-date on the most effective technological innovations?

Chances are that REALTORS are more likely to be able to answer “Yes” to these questions than professionals in other industries. In fact, according to the realestatemarketingblog.com:

“Although many may not believe it, the real estate industry is actually one of the most tech savvy industries around today.

If that’s you, great! You’ve got a great foundation to start out the new year. However, if you feel a twinge of hesitation about your mobile-readiness, educate yourself further or get the assistance you need to get those listings in front of your target home buyers.

It’s the end of the year, or at least very close, and that means for many of the instructors, especially those teaching the CREC Mandatory Update courses, classrooms will be filled with procrastinators who got caught in the trap of waiting until the holiday season to complete their required credits!

We’re all busy professionals. We all get caught up in the daily activities required to meet various family and work obligations. There are good justifications for why taking our mandatory CE classes is a task that can wait until “next month.”

The Trouble With Waiting

The problem with all of our good reasoning is that taking your courses at the end of the year means, well, your information is going to be received at the end of the class cycle. While the course is still good, great in fact, wouldn’t it have made more sense to:

1. Get the newest info while it was still NEW,
   and
2. Have the peace of mind that a requirement had been checked off your to-do list?

Next Year, Sign Up Early

If you have waited this year and now find yourself in the position of needing to take the CREC Mandatory Update course quickly, head over to our calendar and find one that fits your schedule. There are plenty in the Denver Metro and Colorado Springs area.

Looking forward, make your plan to take the course again in the first quarter of calendar year 2012 (and every year thereafter).

Benefits

• You’ll get to put the newest info to work, faster
• The requirement won’t lurk in your mind, or on your calendar, for another year
• Your money and time spent on the course will provide the best possible return