Hey guys, in real estate, we often hear the word "affordability". What does it mean and how can we break it down for our clients? Affordability has three components.

The first one is how much people are making. In the last year, on average, wages have gone up a little over 7%. So people are making a little bit more, which means they can afford a little bit more in their house.

The second leg of this is housing prices. Housing prices have flattened out compared to what we were seeing in 2019 and 2020, and in some markets, we're seeing some declines. Last quarter, home prices decreased by about 4%, which is significantly less than the double-digit gains we have seen in previous years.

The last component is interest rates. Interest rates are having the biggest impact on affordability. But it is important to remember that when buying a home, home prices are permanent, but interest rates and wages are temporary. As wages generally...

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...

As a coach, I tell my students that if they want to be highly visible on social media, they need to meet a minimum standard of five posts a week, two videos, and two stories.

Visibility is more important than ability because if you're invisible, no one knows to do business with you, no matter how good you are.

But many students struggle with knowing what to post. That's why I recommend two game-changing ideas:

1. Educational marketing: When was the last time you posted something educational on social media? Try to educate your audience about the real estate market. You could talk about interest rates, inspections, appraisals, down payment programs, and much more. People love learning new things, and an educational post will establish you as an expert in your field.

2. Opinion posts: People want to hear your professional opinion, and they trust experts who deliver them. Think about highly paid professionals like doctors and...

About a year ago, my wife and I decided to downsize as we hit our fifties. We have four kids, but three of them had already moved out, leaving us with just one. So, we moved from a bigger house into a smaller one. We realized that there are a ton of people just like us all around the country.

Before we downsized, we used to live in a big house near a golf course, and whenever we received marketing from REALTORS, it was always the same thing: The marketing was all about them getting a listing, and we could read right through it.

They just wanted our commission, and it wasn't very effective.

Over the years, we received door hangers, mailers, and all sorts of stuff, but as a REALTOR myself, I couldn't help but wonder if these methods were effective or not. Sure, anything is better than nothing, but what can you do to be more effective?

The key is to focus on the why of someone considering making a move, instead of what you need.

Why...

How do you feel about your social media strategy? 

For most agents and brokerage owners that I speak to they freely admit that their social media strategy could be vastly improved. What's missing for most people I talk to is consistency. The reason isn't because they are lazy, it's simply because they have no idea what to post that will engage their audiences. 

But here is the secret - visibility in today real estate market is more important than ability.

We have all met (or know) a terrible agent in your market. The person that never returns phone calls, does a poor job of representing their clients, is combative in every transaction - and yet they are crushing it with sales and listings. Why? They have high visibility and are top of mind with their audiences. In the reverse you know someone (maybe you) that is a fantastic agent, provides amazing representation, and actually returns phone calls - and yet their business is suffering. Why? They aren't visible in the...

Join this exciting interview as Top Producing REALTOR and Industry Leader Maria Quattrone walks us through how she prioritizes her time by focusing on high value targets. How focused networking yields spectacular results and exactly what she is saying to sellers in today’s changing market. This interview is filled with golden nuggets that you don’t want to miss!

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...

Hey guys, do you want to be a little bit more assertive, not aggressive, but assertive in your market? Let me give you a technique, a tip, and I love this idea. It came from one of my coaching students, and that is the idea of a real estate resume.

So, you are interviewing for a job when you're working for a buyer or a seller, and how many times in the real world, when you get a real job, you have to turn in a resume almost a hundred percent of the time. But what if you just become proactive and you create a real estate resume and you give it to everybody in your database? And you say, "Hey, I'm accepting new buyers and new listings for the spring market coming up, and I just thought I'd give you my real estate resume that you can share with your friends and family about my background as a realtor and my qualifications to help them with all their real estate needs. Here's a copy of it. Feel free to share it with your...

How many referrals did you send out last week to your favorite vendors in your market area? If the answer for most of you is a big fat goose egg, here's the problem:

The problem is you gotta put into place the power of reciprocity.

You start pushing out what you want to receive. Give, give, give, and eventually things will start coming back to you. It's just a natural thought, reciprocity.

We give because we want to be grateful and generous, and we know eventually good things will come back. But when you're not in that mindset of having abundance and you're closed up, you're not ready for opportunity. You have to open yourself up to opportunity by being the person that provides opportunity to others.

When you're out in the market, you're listening for opportunities to help people in your sphere of influence, people that you can help with their small businesses and what they're trying to get done in their lives. When...

How old were you when you moved out of your parents' house? And how old were you when you purchased your first home? New information from the National Association of REALTORS shares the latest data with us on the averages in the US. The average age of someone leaving their parents' house today is... drum roll... 26 years old. And the average age for them to purchase their first home is 34.

So I'm gonna challenge you. Put this out on a social media post and ask that question:

When's the first time you moved outta your parents' house? When did you buy your first house? You're gonna get a ton of responses. Then answer the question yourself like I did recently, and I got a huge response on this, and my answer was, I moved out at 17. I bought my first house at 19.

Then you might dig deeper and say, what's preventing you from taking that next step? If you have some people say, well, I'm not a homeowner yet. Get into that...