Financial decisions for Real Estate

When you help clients make real estate decisions, your advice has a long lasting effect on your clients' financial health and wealth.

In most cases, home equity is the single largest asset that people own. Your ability to guide clients to properties that match their needs and desires, that fit ithin their budgets, and that will give them long-term gain from minimal initial inyestment will impact their financial health and wealth for years to come.

Your influence as a wealth advisor reaches far beyond clients who are in a position to own investment real estate. In your early years, many of your clients may be first-time buyers who are taking their first steps into the world of major financial transactions. Advise them well and they'll remain clients and word-of-mouth ambassadors for years to come. See Chapter 15 for more information about keeping clients for life.

Back in the days of the early 1990s, before the advances of the Internet, the consumer's only avenue to information about homes for sale was through a real estate agent. Every other week, agents received phonebook-sized perioddicals presenting information on properties for sale, with each new entry accompanied by a small, grainy, black and white picture.

Today, consumers can go online instead of going to a real estate office to launch their real estate searches. With a few keystrokes and mouse clicks, they have access to a greatly expanded version of the kind of information that agents used to control. However, once consumers discover a home they want to see, they must contact either the owner or an agent to gain inside access. This is where things get tricky.

Often a consumer signs off the Web and contacts an agent to get inside the home, as if the agent is simply an entry device. As an agent, you need to demonstrate special skills to first qualify the consumer's interest and ability to buy and then to convert the inquiry into a committed buyer client for your business. Next topic gives you ten quick tips to adopt when working with buyers.