Sometimes a seller will say to you, "Well, just sell it to a cash buyer. I don't want to deal with financing."

Have you heard that? We all have from time to time. When you have a seller say that to you, you need to arm yourself with good information so you counter that. And help them understand that the market isn't comprised of a ton of cash buyers.

The good news is that there are more cash buyers that there has been. We've seen a huge uptake in cash buyers. But the current number as of today, in all across the country, is that 25% of the sales done in the country are now cash buyers.

But what's the reverse of that number? The reverse of that number is 75% of the sales are not cash sales. So they're involving some level of financing. Which means that when we list a property, we have to sell it four times in order to create a sale.

We have to sell it to the market, to get them excited about that listing. That's creating that great first impression.

Then we have to sell...

We've just had some excellent news about where homeowners' heads are regarding selling their home.

The latest study shows that 67% of homeowners believe today is a good time to sell, which is one of the record highs we've seen with this kind of thought process.

But when we go deeper into those numbers, according to Realtor.com, it shows this:

1 in 10 homeowners plan to sell this year. 1 in 10!

Think about that when you're driving home tonight and you're driving through your neighborhoods. 1 in 10 of these homes that you're driving by is going to be listed in the next year!

But here's something that's even more exciting:

63% of those are going to be listing their home in the next six months.

The only question is... Who are they going to list with? Is it going to be with you or your competitor?

And if it's your competitor, why did they get the listing when you missed out? The reason is they did one thing that you didn't do:

They made contact and followed up.

Here's...

You'd think by now everybody that was going to refinance their home would have already done it.

Interest rates have been at record lows for months, right? But the answer is, that's not true.

There are 5 million homeowners in America that could benefit from refinancing. And here's how it breaks down, which is crazy:

450,000 of those loans have interest rates above 6.17%. Isn't that amazing In this day and age?

A million of those loans have interest rates above 4.39%.

And 3.6 million have interest rates above 4.21%.

So when we look at that, that's a huge opportunity for you to educate the market in your local area about the power of refinancing. Try partnering with a lender in your local market. And you guys could talk about that through a video or email — really reaching out and doing a good job with communication.

Now what's more powerful about this?

Did you know that when you refi a house, you don't get quite the best rate. You know who gets the best rate?

Buyers!

An interesting new study came out from Zillow recently that talked about what people's attitudes are related to working from home versus working in an office after COVID ends.

What's interesting is that 95% of the American population would prefer to work partly at home and partly at the office after COVID ends.

So big, big differences in how people want to work going forward. But even deeper than that — 36% of the population now prefers to work at home. So basically one third of Americans say they don't want to go back to an office after COVID ends. They just stay working remotely.

What does that mean for housing and real estate? Well, a couple of things:

It means that our trend, which has been trending towards smaller houses for a long time pre-COVID has reversed. Now we're trending towards larger homes where people can work from home, go to school from home, and really have multi-generational families in some cases where people are staying in their homes longer.

So we...

There's a question that we've had for a while now, which is: When are listing is going to come back in full force?

When can we have that expectation that we're going to start to see listings en masse start to come back to the marketplace?

We know there's been hesitancy because of COVID, but now that people are getting vaccines and the economy is strong. So when are we going to start to see people coming back and saying, Hey, I'm ready to make a sale. I'm ready to make a change.

There's an answer for us.

Zillow just did an extensive study talking to industry experts across the country. And the consensus is that it's going to be in the second half of 2021.

So we're coming right up onto that pretty soon here. And we're going to be right in the middle of 2021, which means we're going to start to see an acceleration of listings.

The question is: Are you ready for it? Are you out there lead generating to start stacking up that business now?

So here are three quick strategies...

"Should I wait to buy a house?"

The real question behind that is, do they think prices are going to go down or are they going to go up?

Buyers are always debating this in their mind. They think that there's going to be some kind of dip. But statistically, according to every model we're looking at today, that's not likely because this isn't a "housing bubble." This is a "housing shortage" that we're in.

This is a supply versus demand issue more than anything else. And actually, the experts in the industry have just upgraded their projections for what they anticipate sales prices to do in 2021.

Here's the latest update:

I'm going to compare this to what they said in January. In January, Mortgage Bankers Association, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Zelman & Associates, and the National Association of REALTORS consensus was that home prices during 2021 would go up 5.3%. Somewhere higher, somewhere lower, but the consensus was 5.3%.

Now, what is it today? They just updated these n...

Why do offers get rejected?

This is an important thing to listen to because we're out competing against other offers all the time now. It's almost always a multiple offer situation and your buyers want to know why they lose.

The first thing you have to realize is that about 21% of the buyers that are out there in the market are cash buyers. That's the latest stats from NAR. That's a little bit up from where it was a few months ago, but it's not like it's all the buyers. Only 21% of the buyers are cash buyers. So that means of 10 buyers, two might be cash buyers. Something to be aware of is that when you're competing with a cash buyer, it can put you at a disadvantage. But it's not the only thing that sellers are considering.

A recent study that was done by NAR found these were the biggest reasons why people's offers were rejected:

1. A low offer

They didn't offer enough compared to the competition. It was not because it was cash or not cash, it was strictly based on price...

In 1918, a guy named Ivy Lee was approached by Charles Schwab. Now, when we hear the name Charles Schwab, we might think of the Charles Schwab we know today who invested and traded stocks. But this isn't the same Charles Schwab.

Charles Schwab at that time was one of the most wealthy people in the world. He owned Bethlehem Steel and steel was, of course, a huge deal. So he was a hugely successful entrepreneur.

And so what happened with Ivy Lee and Charles Schwab was Ivy was a consultant — like how we have consultants and coaches today.

Anyway, Schwab came to him and said, "Hey, I want to increase my managers' efficiency and productivity as well as my proficiency and productivity. I want you to give me your best idea. What's it going to cost me?"

So Ivy being a smart salesperson, did a couple of things.

First, he said I'm not going to charge you anything. I'm just going to just give you the idea and then you can pay me what it's worth.

What a beautiful idea! How many of...

There's something happening in the market right now that really will impact your sellers. And that is interest rates are starting to climb a little bit.

When interest rates climb, it affects sellers in two different key ways:

1. It affects what's called buying power of all the buyers in the marketplace.

Here's what that looks like when you're talking about buying power:

If you're a buyer who is going to get a loan of, let's say $300,000, and you had your average down payment that would equal a payment and interest charge of about $1,225 per month. Now that interest rates have come up about a half percent, what does that mean for you?

If you still want to have that same payment, roughly $1225 a month of principal and interest, your buying power actually goes down because interest rates have gone up. You can no longer afford the $300,000 mortgage. Now you can only afford $285,000.

This puts "pricing pressure" on the market.

Now we know we're in some supply-demand dynami...