Real Estate Industry Watch

Industry Interviews

Author’s Note: In keeping with our practice of interviewing interesting real estate industry personalities, Carolyn Capalbo is a REALTOR in Northern Virginia. But she is not the ONLY Carolyn Capalbo in the United States. (There are 4.) One of them is the mother of Ashley Dupree (the infamous “escort” of Eliot Spitzer). Almost instantly, everyone who Googled Carolyn Capalbo saw images of women in bikinis and newspaper articles about the affair. She now has the unenviable task of regaining her image so that she is comfortable having potential clients search for her name.

We caught up with Carolyn at an industry seminar and interviewed her for Real Estate Industry Watch.

EB: Hi Carolyn, you have started a bit of “buzz” in the real estate community as you work to reclaim your name when another “Carolyn Capalbo” became infamous. How is it going so far?

Carolyn Capalbo: The outpouring of support from the Realtor community has been amazing. Agents that I have not met personally have reached out to me and taken time out of their busy schedules to help me reclaim my name. It has been very heartwarming and humbling Read more »

Marketing

Ask any agent about how they are handling their workload, and you are bound to hear that they are very busy.  Whether they are doing one transaction a quarter or eight transactions a month, many agents will always feel like they are swimming uphill.  Of course, they will always tell you they’re not too busy for any of your referrals!

Between listing presentations, property showings, initial appointments, and general networking/meeting functions, there are many behind the scenes activities.  There are dealing with lenders, escrow officers, property inspectors, negotiating short sales, creating marketing materials, etc.  Well, finally someone has come up with the idea of Listing Assistants.  These are not your ordinary virtual assistants.  In Phoenix, one of these operations popped up, and they can:

• Take photos of your property with wide angle lenses
• Create flyers to place at your property
• Place the property on Zillow, Trulia, Craigslist, Postlets, Hotpads, Google Base, and Backpages.
• Create a hosted property specific website with the property address as the domain name.
• Place lockboxes, posts, and your sign

The businesses around here typically charge $125 for the service.  This can be a future symbiotic relationship that benefits both the assistant and the agent.  The Listing Assistant can do the mundane tasks as well as take professional looking photos, and the agent has more time to spend on their clients.  This is certainly a win-win situation.

Franchise Watch

BREAKING NEWS: We are currently trying to get information at this time, but according to two at least two blog sources, the Foo Fighters are taking legal action against RE/MAX – Australia in the Federal court over the use of a “riff” created by them in an advertisement aired on Australian TV. Accounts of the legal action are here. According to these accounts, the band band is seeking unspecified damages in the Federal court.

We currently have calls in to all parties involved and will update this post as more information arrives. If true, what this does emphasize is that a) regardless of whether you hire an independant party to create your advertising copy, it needs to be vetted to make sure that no copyright issues are involved. b) even when you are careful, copyrights can be challenged where people have such open access to each other. (In this case, it was apparently a comment made in an online forum that led to the issue.)

According to the blog post linked above, Nicholas Thiele, RE/MAX’s director of their Australia region, claims that they would not knowingly infringe on a copyright.

More news as it arrives…