Well, I’m sitting in the lounge waiting for my flight to Orlando. I am heading down for REBarCamp and NAR, the once yearly convention for Realtors. Since I have nearly an hour to kill and about 15% battery life on my iPad, this is as good a time as any to write a blog about today’s Mastermind session.

Read more here; http://realtylaboratory.com/2012/11/09/mastermind-for-november-7th-the-reverse-cold-call-and-the-power-of-rentals/

As I reported in an earlier post, I am back from an amazing few days as a TREB delegate at a CREA Special Assembly Meeting in Winnipeg. There were many highlights of my trip including connecting with my friend and awesome blogger Aaron Hoos and getting outside and running both sides of The Red River. Talk about taking it to the streets. Part of the assembly included a full day on social media and technology hosted by the MLS and Technology Committee. In Part 1 of my report I focused on two interesting speakers, Rebecca Mountain of Impetus Consulting and Alex Langshur, Senior Partner of Cardinal Path. You can check out that post here; http://bit.ly/RSpSao Thanks to the great people at The Fairmont Winnipeg for my great room complete with a killer view of the world-famous intersection of Portage and Main.

You can read more here; http://realtylaboratory.com/2012/11/06/mtc-forum-2012-part-two-the-customer-experience-in-a-digital-world-and-6-trends-that-are-going-to-change-business-forever/

They say membership has its benefits, well, last week as part of my director duties with the Toronto Real Estate Board I got to participate, as a voting delegate, in the CREA Special Assembly Meeting in Winnipeg. The timing could not have been better as Toronto was starting to feel the effects of Hurricane Sandy. I took off in some serious rain! The two-day event provided some updates on a few CREA initiatives as well as a day of presentations hosted by the MTC or the MLS and Technology Committee. The MTC Forum hosted some great speakers and I thought it would be worthwhile to provide my top take-a-ways from the day. This is Part One, you can check out Part Two, The Customer Experience in a Digital World & 6 Trends That Will Change Business Forever in a future post.

Read More;http://realtylaboratory.com/2012/11/06/mtc-forum-2012-part-one-defining-your-unique-selling-point-and-making-sense-of-analytics/

There used to be an old saying that the toughest sellers were real estate agents. I’m not really sure why, maybe it is because they are so close to the daily minutia of the market that they can easily pick apart the competition. But lately I’m not so sure. This week I came across two interesting situations.

Read more; http://realtylaboratory.com/2012/10/18/do-you-want-me-to-tell-you-what-you-want-to-hear-or-do-you-want-the-truth/

There are many real estate lies in the world. There. I’ve said it. Most of those lies will be reused like a worn out family heirloom and for years to come they will be passed down and used on Realtor after Realtor. These lies will be the source of countless frustrations and scathing blog posts and yes, I have already written about many of them. Most are just little white real estate lies like “oh, yes, I’ve been approved already” or “I replaced the roof three years ago”. Then there are some of the bigger lies. I’ve talked about a couple in previous posts, like; “I will only buy if it is a real deal” (there never is) http://bit.ly/W6pSbs and, “I’m going to buy when the market crashes” (I’m too scared to take the plunge)http://bit.ly/TB7KHh , so it comes as no surprise when today’s Mastermind uncovered the third and final trifecta of real estate lies…..”I don’t really need to sell”.

Read more here; http://realtylaboratory.com/2012/10/11/mastermind-for-october-10th-the-trifecta-of-real-estate-lies/

One of the hardest things I do as a manager is to come up with interesting topics for my weekly meetings. Yes, they have to engage the audience, they have to provoke a little discussion, they should be informative, and if they can’t be anything else, they should at least make people laugh. Since I’m not all that funny, except to my 3-year-old, I have to spend a bit more time making my meetings a little more interesting and on occasion I fall flat on my face.

Read more;http://realtylaboratory.com/2012/10/10/objection-killer-quest-ce-que-cest/

Happy Friday everyone. Welcome to this week’s Friday Five. Awesome tips on branding and social media for Realtors. Enjoy and have an awesome weekend!

read it here; http://realtylaboratory.com/2012/09/21/the-friday-five-for-september-21/

This month The Ontario Real Estate Association released the results of an interesting survey conducted by Angus Reid on what’s on the mind of potential homebuyers and sellers. The results were quiet interesting. You can read the full report here; http://bit.ly/QjnXQB . The results of the survey were a perfect topic for today’s morning meeting. I decided to go through five of the top concerns and ask the agents what they would do to alleviate them. Here are their responses;

read more here; http://realtylaboratory.com/2012/09/19/alleviating-a-worried-buyer-or-seller/

Every so often it is important to let the experts talk so at this morning’s meeting I invited a panel of some of our top agents to talk about the Fall Market. These are agents that are out in the field “all day everyday” and because of that, they bring a unique perspective to our business. While we are constantly bombarded with reports from banks, and stories from the media, the truest picture of the Market comes from those who excel in the Market.  Here were some of the most interesting comments of the morning.

Read more; http://realtylaboratory.com/2012/09/14/the-morning-meeting-the-fall-market/