As a real estate professional, I often get asked about the biggest demographic group that's currently buying homes.

Well, the answer might surprise you:

It's millennials!

In fact, they make up the vast majority of buyers on the market. So, if I want to get these potential buyers off the fence and into homeownership, I need to focus on their motivations, not just on getting more business.

Here are the top three reasons why millennials are buying homes.

1. Millennials want to build equity in their own home instead of building someone else's equity through rent payments.

This is a powerful message that needs to be a part of our marketing campaigns. Have you ever stopped to think that every time you make a rent payment, you're helping someone else build their wealth? What if you could start building wealth for yourself and your family by owning your own home? Homeownership is within everyone's capability, and I can help you get there. Even if you can't do it today, let...

I want to discuss how to follow up with a seller effectively. Having a reliable follow-up process is essential to getting the seller to sell their house for the highest possible price.

Many agents don't have a set follow-up plan, so I encourage you to adopt a consistent and rigid one. This means that you are consistent in delivering your follow-up to the seller. It all starts with a conversation where you set the seller's expectations when you first take the listing. You say, "Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Seller, I'm super excited to be your listing agent and start working with you. We're going to get your home sold."

One of the things I like to do is to have a weekly follow-up call, and I will provide a complete update on what's happening. This includes virtual showings, physical showings, feedback from agents, the seller's peer group, and any new listings that hit the market. I will also send you a physical report every week.

I usually email it on Monday mornings or afternoons,...

I have a really powerful way to have an honest conversation about commissions with a seller.

This is a great script from one of my top producers.

Here's what he says: "Hey, listen, here's my listing fee. My listing fee is [X, which could be 2.5%, 2%, 3%, or whatever number you choose.] I'm not trying to price-fix here. But what we really need to talk about is what we're going to pay the buyer's agent. We need to look at this as a marketing incentive to get buyer's agents to show the property.

To help you make a decision on what to offer the buyer's agent, I recommend doing a commission map survey. Put a pin on a map and look at every listing that sold within a certain radius, such as a mile, five miles, or half a mile. Of the listings that sold in the area in the last six months, you can see what commission they offered to the buyer's agent.

Based on that, you can decide where you want to be. You can be where most people are offering to buyers, or you can be an ou...

I have a quick question for you:

Are you marketing your marketing?

You might be wondering what I mean by that, right? Well, let me explain: As real estate agents, we do an amazing job for our clients. We use drone photography, staging, postcards, social media marketing, and more to showcase their properties. We go all out to sell their homes in record time and get them top dollar.

But who actually experiences all of this marketing? Sure, the buyers who purchase the property may see it, as well as a small group of people in our closest network. However, not everyone is seeing all of our marketing efforts. In fact, on social media, only about 4-6% of our audience is actually seeing our posts.

So, how do we market our marketing?

One approach is to create a success portfolio. Whenever you have a beautiful, photogenic listing, go all out and create a home book, do exclusive videography, Matterport, and everything else. Treat it like an interview for your next listing. Th...

Did you know that more people in America have pets than children? It's true!

20 years ago, 48% of American families had kids at home. Today, that number is down to 40%.

On the other hand, the number of Americans with pets has increased dramatically, from 56% in 1988 to 70% today.

As REALTORS, this information is valuable to us because it affects our conversations with buyers. When talking to potential buyers, we should ask if they have pets and if their pet will impact their home buying decision. Many people will engage in conversation about their pet's needs and how important they are to the family.

But what if we took it a step further and specialized in working with families that have pets or selling homes with pet-friendly features?

This could be a complete differentiator in the market, as it's not a common focus for REALTORS. Sometimes we need to think outside the box to stand out.

If you want more ideas like this that help you differentiate yourself in the marke...

Today I want to talk to you about the current state of the real estate market:

There's 67% more inventory on the market today than there was a year ago at the same time, which is more than before, but we still need way more inventory than we have today. When you start to see listings linger, you need to remember that there are two types of markets: listings that come into the market and sell instantly with multiple offers still happen today, but then you have another group of listings that hits the market but then just lingers.

When you're talking to sellers at a listing appointment, it's important to talk about being competitive or looking at comparable sales data. Comparative versus competitive sales data is a very important concept that most REALTORS never talk about with their seller clients.

A comparative market analysis, or CMA, is what most REALTORS use to determine a home's value compared to recently sold homes in the market area. While it is a valuable tool,...

I have a challenge for you today:

I want you to imagine that you're a buyer who just landed in your area and has no knowledge about any REALTORS in the marketplace. So, go ahead and search for homes for sale in your market and see what happens. You'll likely be directed to realtor.com or Zillow. Now, pretend you're a buyer and go through the process of searching for a home on these websites.

As you go through the process, you'll notice that the algorithms push you through a funnel. The first thing they'll ask you is what price point you're looking for. They'll give you a list of price points to choose from, and very rarely will buyers type in a specific price. Instead, they'll be guided to choose a range from a dropdown menu.

Then, the algorithms will ask about bedrooms, bathrooms, and square footage before pushing the buyer further into the system. It's important for us as REALTORS to understand how the algorithms work and how they move people through the process, as...

Hey guys, what's the best way to make your real estate marketing really pop, to come to life and generate more buyers and seller calls and emails and texts?

Well, the secret is using the AIDA approach, which stands for:

Attention
Interest
Desire
Action

I want you to go back and measure all your marketing against this standard. It's simple and easy to understand.

It starts with Attention.

Is the marketing you're doing grabbing people's attention, shaking them and saying, Hey, you gotta look at me?When you look at marketing in magazines, on television, or on the internet, it has to break through the other 5,000 advertising messages the average American sees every day. So how do we break through? A lot of times, it's by asking a question, using photography, or creating visuals that are funny, ironic, or shocking. If it's the same old boring photos and headshots that you see with most realtors, it won't do that. We have to get outside the box.

The second thing is Interest.

We...

I want you to think about how many homes you sold last year that were your listings. So let's assume you sold 10 listings or five listings. What if I told you that you could take that 10 in times by five and have 50 transactions as a result of those 10 listings? Or if you took five listings, you times out by five and you could have 25 transactions. Does it sound impossible? It's not impossible. It's totally doable. You just gotta rethink how you're approaching your listings.

What smart, wise, savvy agents do, superstars do is they say, "Hey, I've got one listing and I can turn this into five transactional sides. Now how can we do that?"

I'm gonna walk you through it right now.

What are the five transactional sides that we create?

1. 1. Sell the listing that we take
2. Obtain a triggered listing
3. Convert a buyer who calls or attends an open house for the listing
4. Find sellers at your open house
5. Turn your seller into a buyer and sell them something else

Number one is obv...

Okay guys, we all know that there's not enough listings to sell in our markets across the country, but there's still pretty strong buyer demand despite the interest rates. Every agent that I talk to has buyers, but their biggest struggle is finding buyers' homes. So what we need to look at is a deeper level, we'll call it, underneath where the market is seemingly at. We see that there's just, on the surface, it doesn't look like there's a lot of listings, but underneath that, just boiling underneath is what we can call shadow inventory.

I'm gonna give you a classic example:

I sold my house about a year ago, but for about six months leading up to that sale, I would have sold my house. And what I mean by that is we put the home on the market, you know, and we then sold the house. But I would have sold before that. If an agent had approached me and said, "I've got a buyer and I can sell your house today," I would have absolutely signed a one party listing. I would have absol...