3 Best Practices for Working from Home as a Real Estate Agent During COVID-19

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Many Americans are working from home in 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak. For many, this can be a challenging transition because they are accustomed to an office-type setting. However, it is possible to remain productive during these times of social distancing. If you are a real estate agent, you are having to make the switch from client-facing to other forms of digital communications. While working from home as a real estate agent can present a variety of challenges, there are steps an agent can take to remain productive while at working from home.

Designate your workspaces.

Do you know which areas of your home that you can use as workspaces? By setting certain areas of your home as designated workspaces, you can associate these areas with work. If possible, try to avoid these areas when you are done working from the day. This is because you want your brain to have a clear separation from work and your home life. It is significantly harder to make this distinction when you are working from home and not driving to your office every day.

Create a work schedule for the day.

It can be challenging for many people to stay on task when they are working from the comfort of their homes. This is why it is beneficial to set a daily schedule to keep yourself on track for the day. It does not matter if you create one with a pen and paper or have it on your computer or phone. You just want it somewhere where you can quickly access so you reference it throughout the day. When creating your schedule/checklist, be sure that you prioritize tasks in order of importance. For example, if your most pressing task is to get in touch with a client, be sure that you put that at the top of your schedule. If you need even more structure, you can take this one step further by assigning rough timeframes next to each task.

Don’t forget to get up and move around.

Most real estate agents spend a lot of time on their feet during the day. Between meeting with clients and showing homes, a real estate agent generally spends a considerable amount of time walking around. With this, it can be tough for some agents to transition to sitting at a desk for most of the day. It is important for all workers, not just real estate agents, to remember to take breaks and walk around throughout the workday. Exercise is important for not only our physical health but our mental health as well.

HUD Foreclosures

HUD foreclosures and VA Foreclosures are some of the best homes to buy when price is part of the equation. As with most Americans, price is always a concern. If not buying the same house for less, why not buy more house for the same dollar invested? When looking for a good deal it is hard to do better than the VA or HUD foreclosures market. The simple truth is that there are just more VA and HUD homes on the market, as they represent such a large number of mortgages that are generated each year. This translates into more foreclosures just by the magnitude of difference between all others comparing to the two largest.

The two largest also being government owned and operated means that they have less time to wait to make money back on the home. The FHA is especially known for selling HUD homes for less than the average sales price in a given area. FHA foreclosures represent a fraction of HUD but they are still a significant number of homes and both should be considered.

VA (Veterans Administration) and HUD (Housing and Urban Development) have different and unique opportunities for the buyer. Both are often forgiven for the local taxes normally associated with the purchase of a home (this is on a county by county basis). Be sure to ask the local title company or escrow company to look into it for you before closing as this is often missed due to their are not used to dealing with the 2 to 3 percent of the market that VA and HUD foreclosures represent.

Free Foreclosure Listings

USHUD.com is a website that simplifies the process of finding foreclosures and HUD properties. Everyone thinks they are a real estate web surfing pro until they search for foreclosure homes and stumble upon a numerous sites that want to charge a fee to see their listings. With USHUD.com that’s not the case. When searching for HUD properties or a home finding website for foreclosure it is important to know what you are looking for. It is important to use a niche company that specializes in foreclosures like USHUD.com. We have put together 2 tools that have made the real estate search process of our website much easier to navigate. The Homesearch online tool is filled with foreclosure lists and free listings of hud homes for sale. Most of our users start with a broad search with the homesearch online tool to see the most HUD properties and foreclosure lists in your area and narrow their search down with the Homefinder online tool. The homefinder online tool is a custom filter system that we breakdown the area based upon filters such as convention and foreclosure listings. This give you the option to filter out conventional listings and focus on just the foreclosures in the market. We thank you for making us Americas top home finding website for foreclosure and Hud properties. Free listings of hud homes for sale are hard to come by but should always be free and that’s the way things are going to stay on our website.

Foreclosure Listings Increasing

As the market settled after the mortgage meltdown foreclosure listings also settled and fewer homes were on the market with a placard reading “Bank Foreclosure” in big red lettering. This was a good thing for the entire real estate market. Having an abundance of foreclosures brings the entire market down and it makes it harder for home owners, who would like to move, to get the appropriate price for their home as a similar home down the same street was sold for substantially less and the appraiser is using the foreclosure as a comparable sale.

This is just one of the problems when there are too many foreclosure listings in any area. Another issue is the television set that sits in everyone’s living room harping about the price of homes based on the number of foreclosures and this constant barrage of negative information makes most people sit on the sidelines waiting for the market to either implode completely or to correct itself. Meanwhile while they wait, others are buying foreclosure listings and making great investments.

Whatever the reason, a market can only handle so many foreclosure listings at any given time. The more foreclosures, the lower the market gets and this is a lesson the banks that were foreclosing and selling off realized too late. The market and their investments would have been better off if there had not been a rush to divest themselves of the toxic assets made more toxic by their own actions.