2 Ways a CMA Can Generate Leads
Give me one moment, and I'll get to the lead generation. First, I think a brief definition of CMA will be helpful. A CMA is a competitive market analysis. It provides information about recent sales, homes currently for sale, and other data about a specific geographical area. When used in a listing presentation, your CMA will combine this data with your pricing recommendation and your strategy for selling the home. Okay, okay, you want leads. Let's get to it. 1. Use a CMA to encourage repeat business. Let's say you helped Mr. and Mrs. Smith purchase a home last year. On the anniversary of that transaction, prepare a CMA for the home that they purchased. You don't need to put a price on their home for this CMA. Instead, you can allow the prior sales and homes currently listed to demonstrate the price spectrum in the neighborhood. Mail (or email) this CMA to Mr. and Mrs. Smith with a heartfelt note. Use the data in your CRM to remind you about the specifics of the clients and the transaction. Provide specific details to show that you remember

RPR Agent Case Study
WAV Group provides consulting services to MLSs and Associations to develop strategies and plans for business success. In working with MLSs and Associations, we have learned how difficult it is to help agents and brokers understand the value of new technologies in their daily business. Today, WAV Group is introducing the second in a series of Case Studies developed for NAR's REALTOR® Property Resource or RPR®. These Case Studies are designed to help REALTORS® understand the unique benefits of using RPR in their daily business to help position them as THE local expert. WAV Group developed these best practices by evaluating RPR "power users" and "power promoters" of the software. Download the Agent Case Study here. WAV Group has followed the introduction and rollout of REALTOR® Property Resource (RPR) closely since it was officially introduced and then launched in September 2010. In previous papers, WAV Group outlined the factors needed to make an informed decision about whether RPR and other data-related products were appropriate for individual MLSs and Associations. These case studies are NOT intended to help an organization make a decision about participation in RPR. Those decisions are best left to individual MLSs, Associations and Brokerages. The purpose of this case study is to help agents who are have access to RPR understand how they can the tool effectively in their daily business for reviewing COMPS, building CMA's and providing invaluable market level data and information to their clients and potential new clients. The case study also clearly articulates how RPR is incremental to the tools available in MLS systems.

Choosing a Valuation Tool: CMA vs. AVM
With so many technologies available to real estate agents today, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the terminology and the options. You can hardly determine which technology to choose, let alone how to use it once you've made your choice. Whenever you have these sorts of questions, your broker and your peers can be great resources. But so can we! That's why we're going to continue our trend of comparing product types and explaining different vendors for each. We started along these lines with our comparison of transaction management vs. document management, and today we'll continue with CMAs and AVMs. Valuation Tools CMAs and AVMs are both valuation tools. Let's look at each of them more closely to clearly understand the difference. Competitive Market Analysis (CMA). A CMA is generally used to aid in discussions about the value of an owner's property and the best potential list price. The key here is that the agent prepares the CMA, providing comparable recent sales and their own personal recommendation for listing price. The recommended listing price is based on the comparable homes and the agent's own insights. Automated Value Model (AVM). Already, you may have spotted the key differentiator between a CMA and an AVM – an AVM is automated, meaning that the agent's role in creating the AVM is passive. AVMs rely entirely on mathmatical models to produce an estimate of the value of a home, rather than adding an agent's insights. Many AVMs are available directly to consumers (Zillow's Zestimate is one example of a frequently-used consumer AVM). Now, there's a lot of variation between the products within each of these categories as well. In order to better understand what they do, we talked to a few of the companies that specialize in this