ABC News

Although he’s best known as a UFC — Ultimate Fighting Champion — Hall of Famer who easily defeated opponents, Chuck Liddell also tried his hand at a less violent sport with a stint on Dancing with the Stars in 2009.

Chuck Liddell’s home is for sale on the San Luis Obispo real estate market for $1.2 million. Although “The Iceman” owns a few houses in the area, TMZ reports that the 4,600-square-foot home was Liddell’s primary residence. According to property records, Liddell purchased the luxury estate for $1,275,000 in 2006, at the height of the real estate bubble as well as his MMA (mixed martial arts) career. Median San Luis Obispo home values have dropped 9.5 percent year-over-year. Liddell has priced his home to model that decline; his home is listed at 8.3 percent less than what it sold for in 2006.

The heavyweight champion began his career studying a host of martial arts techniques and is one of the people most credited making mixed martial arts a recognized American sport. For several years, he was the biggest star in the franchise, drawing millions of viewers to pay-per-view broadcast fights. He retired in 2010.

Described as a place fit for “an MTV Cribs lifestyle with out the hustle and bustle of a big city,” Liddell’s home has 5 bedrooms, two of which are master suites, and 4 bathrooms. The home features high-end details like a grand foyer, spiral staircase, and gourmet kitchen with Wolf and Sub-Zero appliances. The backyard has an in-ground pool, spa with rock slide and waterfall as well as a built-in BBQ and sink.

The listing is held by Melissa Kues of The Real Estate Group of San Luis Obispo.

Today’s post is brought to you by our guest blogger, Matt Krautstrunk.  To learn more about Matt, see his bio at the end of the post.

With all this micro-blogging & instant chatting going on these days, email marketing is beginning to seem like a fossilized communication channel. However, email marketing still fits in to a lot of businesses marketing mix, because of its low-cost and high potential for exposure on massive scale. In fact a popular email marketing solution provider did a study on the advent of social in the email marketing industry and found that, ìsocial networks were not decreasing the time Internet users spent on email.î

Whether you are small business marketing to a few hundred people, or a corporation sending out an email to thousands, understand your content is the key determinate of your email newsletters success.

1. The Shorter. The Better

Email that has shorter sentences tends to bode well with readers. If your readers open an email with 2,000 words they are going to panic and most likely close out of your email. Your goal is grab the user with your subject line and essentially catch them with your first two sentences. This can be increasingly difficult for many content writers, so make sure your companies email marketer understands a customerís state of mind when marketing to them. It comes off bad to the company image if they are receiving poor content, so your job is to convince the recipient that your email isnít SPAM and has value to them.

2. Keep it Timely

Articles that are relevant to a certain time will create action. Whether you are reporting on a news story, or simply giving readers a seasonal time frame for a purchase decision. Try to incorporate the clock in your content; doing so correctly will increase open rates and click through rates.

Examples of timely content:

• Spring is here: Getting Hopping With 15% off April Purchases
• Blagojevich is Ousted, What Can Your Business Do Foster a Trusting Environment?
• Party in Red, White and Blue This Summer! Get 25% all 4th of July Merch

Tying your content into your audienceís lives is the key to engagement. You would rather have 100 people find and open your email and click through, than have 250 people open it and then delete it.

3. Solve a Problem

Before you send an email out, ask yourself, ìwhat is the point of this email?î If you canít answer that question, you may want to revise your email. Get to the point within the first paragraph and then back up your point in the remainder of the email. If you are trying to help business owners find a suitable VoIP phone system, the first paragraph may look start out.
ìIf you are like many, your only exposure to VoIP has been watching your wife and kids playing around with Skype. But Skype is feeble in comparison to many corporate VoIP solutions. If your business is looking to lower overhead, unify communication channels and improve sales and customer service, VoIP is for you.î

4. Give Links

Links, Links, Links! With email, the more relevant links you can throw in your email the better. I tend to appreciate emails with timely, relevant links because they can expand on an idea easier than adding another few sentences. If you are able to shorten your content by adding links to explain statements, the do so. More links will also give you more opportunities to drive traffic to your site.

5. Have Fun!

Even some of the most corporate companies able to lighten up a bit on their email content; this gives them a human touch. Social media has become so popular because it allows people to a see more human side of a company. When writing your email content, try and speak with a human voice and reason with your audience with a happy tone.

Remember you are competing with a wide variety of things in a userís inbox. The only way you will stand out in the crowd is getting your audience to trust you by creating engaging and fun content. Give links to relevant material, keep your emails timely and solve a problem; you will begin to see higher open rates and better click through rates as a result.

Today’s post is brought to you by our guest blogger, Matt Krautstrunk.  Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on business pos systems based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as point of sale systems at Resource Nation.

Tags: email marketing tips, Guest Post

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Should real estate agents get first dibs on new listings?

First-time buyers can lose out on distressed real estate

First-time homebuyers are critical to the housing industry. Once they get in the door, this enables the former first-timer to move up, etc. In a nutshell, first-time buyers help to keep the housing ladder moving.

What has skewed this traditional ladder is the number of distressed homes on the market. There are more homes than buyers. So, I wasn’t concerned when I read the latest statistics that some investors had beaten out first-time homebuyers to a purchase. The market needs investors, too.

What made the topic a bit more interesting was a call from an investor friend who conducts rather thorough research in his goal to obtain one rental property each year.

Historically, his key variables have been location, condition of the property, and the ability to rent it out to pay the mortgage — or the money borrowed/invested to purchase and maintain the home. Recently, he’s looked for attractive financing terms, especially situations where the seller (or foreclosing lender) is willing to carry all or part of the financing for a few years.

“I lost the place to another investor,” my friend said. “The buyer was a Realtor.”

This should not come as any big surprise. In fact, on May 17, statistics from the National Association of Realtors revealed that 22 percent of all existing-home transactions were to investors.

“A good portion of the investors are likely to be Realtor members based on the fact that Realtor population historically has had a notably higher percentage of second-home and investment-home ownership compared to the general population,” wrote Jessica Lautz, NAR research economist.

“The most recent data suggest 43 percent of Realtor members had at least one investment property.”

NAR has approximately 1.1 million members and is the nation’s largest trade organization. However, not all real estate salespersons are members. Some analysts estimate the number of real estate agents in the U.S. is close to 2 million.

The question becomes: Should a person who serves homebuyers and sellers for a living be held to different guidelines if they are competing to purchase a home? For example, should the listing be exposed to the market for a certain amount of time (perhaps 48 hours) before a licensed agent can buy a home that somebody else is ready, willing and able to buy? Especially if that party is a first-time home buyer?

In this market, the seller probably does not care. While multiple offers are starting to surface in some neighborhoods, many sellers simply want out and will take the first solid deal that is presented. Rarely are new listings snapped up in the first few days on the market by an investor in competition with a first-time homebuyer. However, it has happened and will continue to occur as the attractive investor market continues.

“It is the agent’s obligation to get the highest possible price for the home,” said Alan Tonnon, real estate attorney, author and a charter member of the Washington Real Estate Commission. “That price may even be higher than the listing price. It is typically in the seller’s best interest that no restrictions be set on offers so that the seller can consider all offers.”

Many real estate brokerages are members of multiple listing services. These “multiples” are large listings of all the properties available for sale in a specific area. When a seller signs a listing agreement to sell a home, the agent accepting the listing typically has until 5 p.m. of the next business day (formerly two business days) to enter the property in the multiple listing service. So, if the property is listed on Friday, the agent has until 5 p.m. Monday to enter it in the MLS.

When homes are moving quickly and certain areas become extremely desirable, it’s common for a property to be sold to a client represented by an agent in the listing office within this “next business day” time period. Sales associates share the wants and needs of their potential buyers, despite the separation of information required by new agency laws.

So when an attractive home becomes available, associates in the listing office typically have the first shot at selling it.

What is your opinion? Should agents be able to compete to purchase a home the first day it hits the market? If not, when? Should first-time buyers be given priority over investors? Agents? We will print your answers in a future column.

Tom Kelly’s book “Cashing In on a Second Home in Central America: How to Buy, Rent and Profit in the World’s Bargain Zone” was written with Mitch Creekmore,  senior vice president of Stewart International, and Jeff Hornberger, the National Association of Realtors’ international market development manager. The book is available in retail stores, on Amazon.com and on tomkelly.com.