Congratulations!   You’ve now registered for our special webinar training on Thursday (November 5) at 9:00 PM ET, where we’ll discuss why investors and agents don’t get along - and how to very successfully and profitably bridge the gap.  To join the webinar at that time, go to this link:  http://BryanEllis.com/webinar/

Real estate investors and real estate agents don’t seem to get along very well.  Seems like it would be a match made in heaven since real estate agents need to find buyers and sellers for properties and real estate investors frequently do multiple transactions each year.  Alas, mixing agents and investors is frequently more of an oil and water type of thing.

To an extent, I can understand it.  Investors have the advantage of being able to make significantly more money per transaction than agents along with a much lower barrier to entry.  Just think about it:  Investors use “home made” signs that say “I Buy Houses” and show their telephone number, whereas agents create full-color glossy brochures and business cards to convey a more professional image.  And when a real estate investor closes a deal, he/she can easily make an amount far in excess of the 2-6% that the real estate agent will make under the best-case scenario.

And then there are the legal issues.  Real estate agents get “protection” legally because they are licensed, but the price they pay is serious limitations in the way they can do business… and there are a seemingly unlimited number of missteps that can be made which could result in the revocation of an agent’s license and therefore their livelihood.  Investors, on the other hand, have a significant amount of freedom in the way they structure their own deals.

The question becomes:

• Is it worthwhile to find a way to help investors and agents work together better?  If so, then…
• How can such a cooperative relationship be formed for the benefit of everyone involved?

I happen to believe that working with agents is not the right answer for many real estate investors.  But the fact remains:  the mass-market of real estate is always going to be handled by real estate agents, and to ignore them as a matter of policy is to overlook a huge and substantial portion of the opportunity in today’s real estate market.

That’s why we’re having our special webinar on Thursday (November 5) at 9:00 PM ET.  I have had the good fortune of getting to know a man who is a bona-fide expert when it comes to structuring highly profitable and completely win-win scenarios between real estate investors and real estate agents, and he has scores of big checks to prove it.

I’ll tell you more about it tomorrow, but take a moment now to mark this time on your calendar:  Thursday, November 5 at 9:00 PM ET.  At that time, just go to this page to join the special webinar:  http://BryanEllis.com/webinar/

In the mean time, feel free to sound off with your questions about working with real estate agents.  And if you happen to be an agent, please tell us if you are frustrated by the notion of working with real estate investors and how that relationship could be improved.  Use the comments area below to leave your questions & comments.

Thank you for reading http://realestate.BryanEllis.com!

Terry Wygal is a Real Estate Agent in the Atascocita, Kingwood and Humble area. Terry provides assistance if you are looking to buy houses in the Kingwood, Atascocita or Humble area.

The housing market continues to surprise. Last week, the latest good news came in the form of the monthly Existing Home Sales report.

An "existing home" is a home sold by an existing owner as opposed to a developer. It's non-new construction property.

The data on Existing Home Sales was noteworthy for its trends:

1. Sales volume rose over four straight months for the first time in 5 years
2. Sales volume rose year-to-year for the first time in 4 years
3. Median home prices fell for the first time since April

Furthermore, first-time home buyers and buyers of "distressed" homes accounted for nearly one-third of the market activity each.

But, before we declare a bottom in housing, it's important that we remember the First Rule of Real Estate -- All Real Estate Is Local.

The Existing Home Sales report is not neighborhood-specific. It lumps cities like San Diego and Saint Paul into a giant sample set and fails to account for regional differences in real estate, let alone neighborhood ones.

This is the primary reason why on-the-ground real estate agents are better sources for a market pulse versus a report from a national trade group. The national group can't know the happenings of every street and every home in a market.

That said, however, the national data isn't completely useless.

Looking at the long-term patterns in the Existing Home Sales report, we can infer that ample supplies, low mortgage rates and tax credits are spurring home sales in a lot of U.S. markets.

Eventually, this will lead home prices higher.

Super Bowl Weekend traditionally marks the start of the Spring Buying Season in real estate. Anecdotally, real estate agents will tell you that buyer activity tends to tick higher at this time of the year.

Meanwhile, with mortgage rates still trolling near all-time lows and Congress debating a first-time homebuyer tax credit, 2009 may bring out even more buyers than we've seen in the past.

Just having your home on the market may not be enough to attract an offer, though -- the home has to have appeal. That brings us to home staging -- the process by which a homeowner re-organizes and re-presents his home to appeal to as many potential buyers as possible.

Home staging is part-science, part-art, and part-psychology. Homebuyers tend to judge homes within the first 8 seconds of seeing them so making a quality first impression can mean the difference between getting multiple bids, and just getting a lot of foot traffic.

The 4-minute video gives some quick-and-easy tips, including:

• Create more light in the home
• Clean up the closets and thin them out
• Remove the clutter from every room in the house

Even though home inventories are falling, supplies are still higher than in previous years. Home sellers wanting to stand out in a crowd may want to consider staging their homes to help them sell more quickly.

Staged homes sell for as much as 17% more money and as much as 40% faster than non-staged ones.