IXACT Contact is a software company that offers CRM and email marketing products to real estate professionals. It’s hosting a webinar on Tuesday, May 22, at 1 p.m., Eastern time, on using its CRM product to grow your business. Shannon McGee, a company business development executive, is the host.

From IXACT:

Wondering exactly how a real estate CRM can help you better manage and grow your business? Join this information-packed webinar and see specific real-world examples of how a robust real estate CRM can make it easy to keep in touch and stay on task with all your clients, prospects, and important referral sources.

In this webinar, IXACT Contact executive Shannon McGee will show you how IXACT Contact’s real estate CRM can help you to:

1. Keep in touch effortlessly with everyone in your database so you stay top of mind.
2. Ensure that you never miss another client birthday or move-in anniversary – both excellent relationship building opportunities.
3. Nurture and stay top of mind with all your prospects so you get the listing and not your competition.
4. Identify high quality leads – hiding in your database!
5. Stay organized and in control of all your listings, closings, and active buyers.
6. [BONUS!] Create a professional online presence and generate leads with your own customizable, mobile friendly, agent website.
7. [DOUBLE BONUS] Double your social media lead generation with automated social media content posting!

Register.

This is a sponsor webinar. REALTOR® Magazine is promoting it, but it isn’t participating in it, hasn’t reviewed the content, and is not endorsing it.

While the Fair Housing Act’s purpose—barring discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of residential property—may be easy to understand, navigating the many intricacies of the landmark statute can be tricky even for experienced real estate professionals, said experts on the 1968 law who spoke during a recent event in Fairfax, Va.

The event served as a commemoration of the 50-year anniversary of the signing of the Fair Housing Act, and was organized by the Fairfax County of Human Rights and Equity Programs and sponsored by the Northern Virginia Association of REALTORS®, Legal Services of Northern Virginia, and the Prince William County Human Rights Commission.

Panelists talk about the Fair Housing Act during a training session in Fairfax, Virginia.

The challenges stem from the fact that the law requires real estate professionals to ensure their clients not only have equal access to properties, but also that they drive the selection of the neighborhood or home they want to live in. Even a well-meaning effort to match a client with property you think they would like can have legal consequences.

For example, if you are working with a Korean family that is looking for a home to purchase, taking them to neighborhoods where you know other Asian-Americans live could run afoul of the law if the clients did not specifically ask to go to those neighborhoods. That’s according to attorneys from the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights division and Legal Services of Northern Virginia who served on the panel.

Panelists also advised caution when taking steps aimed at ensuring the safety of your clients. While it might seem reasonable to steer a family with young children away from a home they are looking to buy or rent that has lead-based paint, for instance, doing so would violate the law if the family was aware of the presence of the paint and still wanted to live there. It’s not against the law to market homes with lead-based paint to families with children and let them live there as long as they have been made aware that the hazardous paint is present.

Professional appraisals are the foundation on which stable real estate markets are built, so ensuring appraisers are able to do their jobs to the best of their ability is vital to the industry. That’s why a report from the federal government on appraisal quality is welcomed. Two economists with the Federal Housing Finance Agency in a working paper found that appraisals ordered by appraisal management companies, AMCs, are no more likely to be overvalued than appraisals ordered directly by the lender.

“The results indicate no clear evidence of any systematic quality differences between appraisals associated and unassociated with AMCs,” say the economists, Jessica Shui and Shriya Murthy.

Although both types of appraisals have similar levels of overvaluation, according to the researchers, AMC appraisals tend to be more prone to contract price confirmation and super-overvaluation (above 6 percent). And both types have the same level of mistakes, even though AMC appraisals tend to use more comparable properties in the analysis.

AMCs are entities that are intended to let lenders maintain an arm’s length distance between them and the appraiser. They’ve been a part of the industry for decades but it wasn’t until after the mortgage crisis about a decade ago that their use became a big part of the industry. That’s because the Federal Housing Finance Agency entered into an agreement with the state of New York to encourage their use for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac transactions. Once their use in New York was set, Fannie and Freddie extended it to all of their transactions, making the use of AMCs a national policy. Later, their use became even more standardized by the federal government.

NAR takes the position that AMCs are one way to encourage appraiser independence. Under its Responsible Lending Principles, NAR supports the principles of appraiser independence that AMCs are designed to facilitate, but the association also recognizes that alternatives to AMCs can provide the same conformity to appraiser independence rules.

The FHFA’s report is a top segment in the latest Voice for Real Estate news video from NAR. The video also looks at the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation from the European Union. The rule takes effect later this month and while most web companies have been aware of the rule for a while, for many people it comes as a surprise and they wonder if it’s something they have to concern themselves with. The short answer is, they probably do. That’s because the E.U. has said it plans to enforce it across the board, which means it could try to take action against a company even if it’s American and caters to Americans.

Under the rule, anyone who resides in the European Economic Area is entitled to certain privacy rights. Thus, if you have a website and a European resident comes to it to, say, browse listings, you can’t put a data-tracking cookie on their computer without getting their permission upfront. Right now, that permission is implied and they have to choose to opt out. So, this rule flips current U.S. practices on their head. Instead of them opting out, you have to ask them to opt in.

The rule requires other things as well, but, bottom line, expect to make changes to how you track people who come to your site.

You can expect lawsuits once the E.U. tries to enforce the rule in the United States, but separate from that, large web operations that want to cater to as many people as possible are probably going to make the changes regardless of what the E.U. does. Eventually, that will change the standard in this country.

The video also looks at the latest home sales figures, which are up, despite persistent inventory shortages, and an upcoming webcast NAR is hosting to let people know what REALTORS® will be talking to members of Congress about when they come to Washington for the 2018 Legislative Meetings later this month. There are four talking points: indexing some tax reform provisions to inflation, reauthorizing flood insurance, improving Fair Housing, and protecting net neutrality.

Watch video now.