Written by:  Nathan Thomas

A bill that would pay displaced Louisiana homeowners 60 percent of their equity to help them stave off foreclosure in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was approved by a House committee last week.   Read more...

It can be hard to get back into the swing of things after weeks of holiday shopping, parties and eating. But this year, make it your New Year's resolution to get a jump start on your marketing efforts. Here are three types of customers that you should be marketing to early in 2006:   Read more...

A "loose network of crooked real estate appraisers" is systematically stealing the identities of legitimate appraisers in the Chicago area and nationwide and using them to engage in multimillion dollar mortgage fraud, the Chicago Tribune reported last week.   Read more...

If you're like most mortgage brokers, much of your marketing time and money is spent on generating new prospects and, save the occasional holiday card or e-mail, little effort is spent on past clients - even though they're the best source of repeat and referral business. We recently re-engineered XSellerate, the automated marketing program, to make it easy for you to keep up your relationships with those precious past clients in three easy steps, allowing you to maintain a healthy flow of business in the New Year!   Read more...

When you logged into your XSite last week, you probably noticed a new look to your My Office area. That's our gift to you for the holidays - an entirely redesigned My Office admin area that will make running your business easier than ever. All of the features you've been using are still there (along with a few new ones); we've simply moved a few of them around so all the tools and features you use the most on your XSite are in one central place.   Read more...

Our constitutional system leaves many - most - things to the states to regulate. Even USPAP and appraiser regulations are state-level laws. Congress has no constitutional authority to regulate the practice of real estate appraisal. So what FIRREA did was to provide that if banks wanted federal entities like Fannie Mae or FHA to buy or insure loans, or if the banks themselves were federally chartered, they had to use real estate appraisers who had minimum qualifications.   Read more...

Guerrilla marketing is loosely defined as any unconventional or creative way that small businesses market their services. The concept, which was popularized by Jay Conrad Levinson in his book Guerrilla Marketing, was originally used by small businesses operating on tight budgets. But today most businesses - big and small - incorporate some kind of guerilla marketing tactics into their marketing plans.   Read more...

Among the concerns we hear from appraisers warming up to the idea of registering their intellectual property - that is, their appraisal reports - with the U.S. Copyright Office is that $30 a pop is too prohibitively expensive. Critics of the idea who want AVM companies to continue to have free reign to copy and reuse your work have warned that you just aren't getting enough for your money.   Read more...

During the holidays your prospects' e-mail inboxes are bombarded with seasonal deals and coupons from retailers and you may be wondering how effective your e-mail marketing is this time of year. The rule of thumb used to be to avoid sending email marketing at all during the holiday season - roughly November through the first week of January. But to assure you have plenty of business in the New Year, you need to constantly stay in front of your prospects. By following a few guidelines, you can assure your e-mails get read and, more importantly, generate business.   Read more...

As you know, your XSite comes with unlimited professionally-written content pages, which you can edit as needed to make them more personal or more geared towards your market. But you may also want to write your own content pages from time to time. But writing content for the web is different than writing an essay for English class. Web surfers rarely read web pages word by word; rather, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences that appeal to them.   Read more...