Dear REALTOR® community: It's been a brutal couple of days for Las Vegas community as the world has seen. One evil person showed something... but the 2 million people who live here showed something entirely different - our strength and unity when someone attacks our home. We've come together in our darkest hour as a real community.

Is it Time for you to Re-Brand? I’ve always been skeptical about real estate agents and their “Brands”. I hear a lot of agents talk about it, but for most their brand exists only in their own minds and doesn’t bear out in anything else. At Cunningham Group, we recently completed a full re-brand and one of the challenges in doing so, is I wanted to make sure the brand would permeate at all levels of the company.

I've come to find that stats can really help you position yourself as an expert in the market. Being able to back up what you're saying with hard data can help you gain credibility and really be the one who people look to in the community. As a part of the GLVAR (Great Las Vegas Association of REALTORS), we have access to a great tool that shows historical data in various ways.

While referrals are a big part of my business, I know that I still need to generate leads to grow my business. Below is the formula I use and I've continued to see growth year over year. Credit: www.realestateexpress.com REFERRALS Some agents work strictly on a referral basis and it works for them. That said, always keep referrals in mind when talking with agents around the country and anyone you meet in the community.

As real estate agents, we are typically all over the place and are well known for starting and never finishing things. But, can you blame us? We're trying to do the job of multiple people. Sometimes we wear our agent hat, other times we wear our marketing hat or our finance hat. That said, if we don't want to hire an assistant, finding a way to increase productivity and actually be productive every day is key.

The Las Vegas Valley market is really starting to heat up (not like that). We don't believe we are looking at another bubble situation, but I recently shared a post to Facebook about my thoughts and got some great engagement. As a REALTOR, you are the expert in the housing market and everyone really looks to you to understand what's going on. By the time most people realize it, it's too late.

While I'm sure many of you have heard of the book "Raving Fans", if you haven't, I would highly recommend checking it out. Click here to see it on Amazon. That said, how do you create raving fans? On our team, we pride ourselves on our customer service. By no means am I referring to someone who says Yes to everyone and about kills themselves trying to meet the customer's expectation.

I currently have a couple listings on the market so I thought it might be helpful to share what I do and see what everyone else does to help keep their client in the loop about their listing. I have a couple forms set up with checklists to send clients with reporting on the listing efforts. I tend to conduct 10 day and 21 day market updates for customers. Below is my checklist of things I complete to help sell their home.

There has been a recent wave of phishing attacks that try to trick you into opening "secure documents". If you receive an email that looks like it is a DocuSign, EchoSign or Secure Adobe PDF notification with an important document attached that needs to be looked at. My company has recently experienced this, but we caught it in time before anything major occurred.

I'm sure you're wondering how I pulled off that hat! But, in all seriousness, this is from a recent housewarming party I hosted for my clients. It was combined with their daughter's birthday party. I had a great time and guess what, they took the time to post a review on just about every website you can think of!

Have you heard about #GetSocialSmart Academy? If you haven't, I would suggest at least looking into it. It's been very helpful for me so I want to take a minute to share a little bit about it. It's a special group unlike any other one I've came across before that is specifically for REALTORS and focuses on social media. As a REALTOR, we're always looking to find ways to stay up to date on the latest industry trends.

As everyone is starting to compile their needed documents for taxes, I've always found it to be a best practice to send the HUD-1 form to my previous year clients who bought or sold a home with me. By doing this, it saves them the time from digging through their paperwork to find it to help them complete their taxes. You can also send them a tax preparation checklist to help them out. You can find a copy here.

Referrals are by far my favorite type of lead, but in order to truly grow your business, you have to find a lead generation source that can help get you past your goal. That is truly the challenge for most of us. The last 2 years, I've spent a lot of time, effort and money trying to find the best lead generation source and pay per click has been one of the best lead sources thus far.

Some people use PPC and SEO interchangeably, but they are actually different methods of getting traffic to your website. The easiest way to explain it would be SEO is your website's ability to organically drive traffic to your website and PPC is paying for clicks to your website. While SEO is great, it can take time, and PPC allows you to be more selective in the type of traffic you are trying to drive to the website.

Have you ever considered doing housewarming parties for new clients? If not, hopefully this will help! I offer all of my new clients the option to have a housewarming party. Not all of them take me up on it, but the ones that do are always impressed. It's a great opportunity for them to get together with their friends and family to show off their new home without having to worry about the cost of the food.

Last Friday we dropped off several boxes of toys and clothes to Child Haven, as a result of a holiday drive for toys and clothes. I had the opportunity to tour the facility and learn more about Child Haven, as well as meet some of the kids. It was a great experience to not only hold a drive to help our community, but to get to see the direct impact no matter how small or large of a donation that is given.

Being a REALTOR is a unique job. We not only help our clients buy and sell their homes, but we also run our own business. With social media becoming a bigger part of how people communicate, REALTORS have to learn to adapt and find ways to stand out among the crowd. Social media can be very overwhelming these days with so many platforms, but below are some tips to help you tackle it. 1.

Shawn Cunningham, CRS, a REALTOR® in Henderson has been named to the Council of Residential Specialists National Board of Directors for a three-year term beginning in January 2017. Shawn joins a newly streamlined 9-member board that will steer CRS into the future as the preeminent organization of residential REALTORS®.Shawn, a 13-year member of the local Greater Las Vegas Association of REALTORS®, interviewed and underwent a…

Referrals account for a large portion of my business every year so keeping in touch with my clients is key. Although creating great relationships with clients is critical, so is staying top of mind. I would recommend having a 33 Touch Plan in place for your clients. A 33 Touch Plan is a year long plan with 33 ways you are in touch with your client throughout the year. Below are 3 easy touches to get you started... 1.

It seems like a silly question, but during the home buying or selling process you may have really gotten to know your client, but do you still remember all of the details from a client you sold a home to over a year ago? After some deep thought, you might be able to start to remember details, but why worry about it when you can just pull up their information?