Programs
The Nuts & Bolts of Escrow
The Nuts & Bolts of Escrow provides real estate, escrow and title insurance professionals a comprehensive guide to the escrow process in California. Contents include: Escrow Overview, Opening Escrow, The Title Search, Holding Title, Insuring the Condition of the Building, Finance Principles, Finance Practice and other escrow issues. The course consists of online text organized by topic into lessons which are laced with hypertext links to an extensive real estate and escrow glossary. Exams are open book, administered over the Internet. Results are given to the student immediately. Test drive the course for free.
All About Title Insurance and Escrow Closing
All About Title Insurance and Escrow Closing provides a comprehensive overview to title insurance and the closing process. Contents include: Title Insurance Overview, Prorations, Impounds, Escrow Instructions, Tax Deferred Exchange - Regulation “Z,” Power of Attorney and Escrow Closing. The program consists of online text organized by topic into lessons which are laced with hypertext links to an extensive real estate glossary. Exams are administered over the Internet. Results are given to the student immediately. Test drive the course for free.
Books
The Complete Guide to Your Real Estate Closing
Suited to the experienced real estate professional or first-time home buyer, this book explains buyer and seller money-saving strategies, escrow accounts, title search and title insurance, closing documents and paperwork, last-minute sales price adjustments, closing costs and more. Author Sandy Gadow is a nationally recognized expert on escrow and closing practices, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal’s online real estate website and guest on CNN Financial News. Read more.
Endless Referrals (Third Edition!)
How do you maximize your marketing effort without busting your budget? Repeat and referral business! While this book by Bob Burg is not specific to escrow and settlement services, it is a primer for recognizing and capitalizing on every networking and referral opportunity that may be passing you by. Identify the profitable contact, overcome your fear of rejection, and dramatically increase your business. Read more.
Killer Customer Care
This no-nonsense look at the essentials outlines strategies for gaining the ultimate competitive advantage: loyal customers. As the author points out, it costs more to attract a new customer than to keep a previous customer coming back. (It not only costs more, but you have to start all over with a new relationship. Keeping existing customers is so much easier!) Read more.
Marketing Your Services
If you’re like many in the industry, marketing yourself to prospective customers is your least favorite part of the job. This book will not only show you how to successfully make self-promotion an automatic part of your work, it will show you why and how marketing can be comfortable for you. (If you have repeat and referral business, you’re already successfully marketing yourself. Learn a extra few tips to increase your results.) Read more.
The Little Book of Business Wisdom
This compendium by Peter Krass gathers advice from 50 successful individuals from the past and present who have a thing or two to say about handling yourself in business. The personal guidelines provided here are based on personal experience, and they are arranged into eight chapters by broad topic, including Management Principles, Leadership Secrets, and Maxims for Life. (This is an interesting and informative book that you may want to keep handy as a reference tool.) Read more.
Power of Full Engagement
The authors offer a program based on athletic coaching programs aimed at stressed individuals who want to find more purpose in their work and ways to better handle their overburdened relationships. Balancing stress and recovery and managing energy is critical in all facets of our lives. (You’ll have to be disciplined to keep up with the ideas in this book, but the result is amazing energy!) Read more.
Life Matters
The writers co-authored First Things First with Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People), and here they cover creative ways to successfully balance four major aspects of life: family, money, work and time. The premise of their program rests on what the authors call three gotta do’s: validate expectations, optimize effort and develop navigational intelligence. This thoughtful self-help manual is not a quick read, but its advice is sound and can easily be applied to daily life. (Not an easy read, but wonderful insight if you take it in little bites.) Read more.
Power of Focus
No matter how they earn a living, most people are looking to achieve more in less time, while earning enough money to live comfortably. This book reveals the proven techniques thousands of people have used to attain all of the money they wanted while living healthy, happy and balanced lives. The Power of Focus, from the co-authors of the bestselling Chicken Soup for the Soul, is a practical no-nonsense guide that shows readers how to reach their business, personal and financial goals without getting burned out in the process. (This is food for thought along with a workable plan for a balanced successful life.) Read more.