Blog Review: Imagine Your House

By Stevie Duffin Updated on 3/3/2014

Lynn Pineda is an agent’s agent, a fact that is impossible to ignore when you visit her website, ImagineYourHouse.com:

“[Choosing a real estate agent] can be downright terrifying, as it’s likely known by now, that far too many Agents will call themselves experts, experts at whatever it is a home Seller is in need of; whether it’s a Short Sale, a Relocation, representing young adults, older adults, multi family, single family home and on and on, everybody seems to want to call themselves an expert even when they’re not; talk about lacking integrity.”

The Coral Springs, Florida realtor has made a name for herself by championing the agent-picky home buyer, and aggressively encouraging buyers to use realtors in general.

Pineda’s platform isn’t a soapbox, however, and her blog entries provide extremely useful tools for the agent choosing process. In the entry with the excerpt above, she lists her standards:

• Professional who demonstrates high integrity and trustworthiness.
• Skilled at marketing homes and oneself which is evident in a Google search; Google their name and you should see them blasted across the internet as the Real Estate professional you’d hire. If they can’t market themselves they won’t be able to reach Buyers to sell homes.
• Proven track record of selling homes, not just a handful of homes each year
• Proven track record of getting top dollar for homes sold
• Knowledgeable of the local Real Estate market
• Passion for their job as a Realtor
• Excellence in communication and negotiation skills
• Favorable customer reviews. Quite often you can be assured of the above traits when you read a customer review. Many of my customers routinely spell it out in their favorable reviews they present of me.

Just so you have a clear picture of how popular Pineda’s tips really are, I’ll tell you that at the time this review was written, the above post had 79 social shares from the page alone – a commendable feat for anyone, let alone a local real estate agent.

But as I said from the get-go, Pineda is an agent’s agent, and she’s cast her net far beyond the reach of many other local realtors. Her articles and “Real Estate Tip of the Day” posts are staples in the online real estate community, and that’s because Pineda has turned ImagineYourHouse into an inarguably successful social media flagship.

The Tips of the Day are short, sweet and substantial. One that hit a little close to home for me was the October 31 2013 entry, Find a Caretaker for Your Exotic Pets:

“Many Buyers will get the heebie-jeebies upon seeing your treasured rodent, reptile, amphibian or non-human primate.Even though you may genuinely love your exotic pet, you’d better find temporary housing when trying to sell your home.If a Buyer walks into your home and their skin crawls, they’ll look for another home to buy.”

Before Lynn Pineda, I might have had my beloved, scaly pets in full view during a home showing.

Pineda’s most powerful implement is her authoritative understanding of the home buyer mindset. Before she gives you a tip, she makes sure she’s gotten into your head:

“Competition is a fact of life amongst us humans and so much of what we do involves competition. We know that competition isn’t about cooperation, but rather its presence is when competing parties try to outshine each other by offering a shinier, better object of attraction.  The same holds true when you are selling a home . . . There are ways in which you can survive and even thrive in this very competitive home selling scenario.”

With 58 social shares directly from that entry’s page to date, I think Pineda knows how to practice exactly what she preaches.

Visit the ImagineYourHouse.com blog; whether you need a realtor near Coral Springs or not, you’ll be smarter for it.