Introduction to Kimberly and Our Business

Article from: http://www.stlagent.com

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By: Darin "Sid" Cameron, CRS
Mon, Jul 2nd, 2007 12:40 pm

Yesterday I introduced myself. Well, today I should also tell you a little about my wife and team leader, Kimberly as well as a little bit about our business.

As I mentioned, my wife is the actual real estate guru. Kimberly left corporate sales to help start up a small real estate investment business with family around 10 years ago. Over the years she's rehabbed, owned a property management company, ran a mortgage brokerage, managed new construction projects and eventually became a real estate agent on the side to sell their new construction for their start-up (builder owned) brokerage.

In May 2004, she decided it was time to spread her wings and become "just an agent" so she moved to a Prudential franchise and started from scratch.

After years of working with family Kimberly decided she wasn't going to target "friends and family" like every other agent. Suffice it to say, she didn't do a lot of business initially. However in December I revamped her website so it would capture more internet leads. It worked.

In January 2005, a few months before we were to get married, I quit my job and joined her in real estate as her web developer (with one listing, a couple of leads and a healthy fear of failure!) Looking back, it really wasn't a smart move but somehow we made it.

At that time Kimberly had just started using an incubation (VOW) system called "The Home Buyer's Scouting Report" which has been the basis of our business ever since. We did 24 transactions in 2005 (Kimberly's first full year as an agent) and 58 in 2006.

Unfortunately we're on target to show a flat year for 2007.

That's because in 2005 we had started building a specialization working with rehabbers in the older parts of the city. With Kim's background in rehabbing it was a natural specialization. But last fall that market changed drastically (for the worse) and it forced us to stop and revamp what we were doing.

After reading The Millionaire Real Estate Agent and attending NAR last November, we made several drastic changes to our business for this year.

We moved from our Prudential franchise to a RE/MAX franchise, replaced our staff processor with a Virtual Assistant (VA) and made buyer's agent staffing changes. We also killed the investment real estate specialization, parted ways with our investment specialist agent and dropped 30 rehabbed listings that we don't think are sellable in this market.

We also replaced several key vendor partnerships and have mapped out a strategy to get Industry Certifications (Kimberly just went to Arizona to take her first CRS class last month).

Kimberly and I both believe in life long learning and try to attend 1-2 major tradeshows a year. Kimberly also started up a local networking group of the more savvy agents we've met (kind of like a Mastermind Group).

It's been a long year with all the changes but so far I don't regret a single one of those decision and I think we're putting ourselves in a position to survive the market changes.