What I've Been Up To Lately

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By: Darin "Sid" Cameron, CRS
Mon, Feb 19th, 2007 11:42 am

An agent I know in Texas asked me what I've been up to lately since there hasn't been as much activity on my website or blog lately.

Unfortunately, other projects have just taken priority, sorry.

However we've made a lot of changes over the past 30 days which I consider positive, so let me share them with you.

Last year we started using an online transaction management system called Settlement Room to keep our contracts organized and efficient. If you haven't used it, I highly recommend you look into it. It's really taken the job of managing our contracts from a full-time job to a part-time need.

Since one of our Buyer's Specialists left us a few months ago for a great opportunity outside of the industry, we've decided to promote our team's contract processor to full-time Buyer's Specialist as a replacement.

Because Settlement Room has streamlined that position so much, we've been interviewing Virtual Assistants to take over the management of Settlement Room contracts on a per-job flat-fee basis instead of hiring another full-time assistant. Right now we've just started our test transaction to see how well it goes using a virtual assistant that's not local to our office. If successful, we believe this will greatly improve the bottom line of our business.

The biggest change for us, however, is we're in the process of migrating lending partners for our Scouting Report home search tools. This is a big deal for us because our new partner offers a lot of value add services that we think will really improve the success we have using this tool and hopefully grow our buyer's business.

From a technology standpoint, I've been setting up a Windows networked server to run our new Contact Management software, ACT!, which is replacing Top Producer. I significantly underestimated the time and complexity of this project but finally have it up and running.

On the side I've been creating new lead generation campaigns for our buyer's agents and trying to implement QuickBooks to manage our back office tasks. It's been a lot to take on at once.

Unfortunately with all this going on, last Friday my laptop crashed and it appears my backups for e-mail wasn't really working so I might be out months of e-mails and other files.