I have a question for you:

Who is your #1 competitor in your marketplace?

When I ask that to a live audience, I'll hear all kinds of the typical brand answers. You'll hear the brands in their marketplace: Remax, Coldwell Banker, eXp, John L. Scott, Sotheby's, etc.

And I always tell them, you're all wrong. Your #1 competitor in your market is Zillow. Zillow is coming to eat your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And in a large degree, they already are. Now, yes, Zillow has stumbled with their flipping operation. But does that mean they're going away? No. If anything, we should be more terrified now than ever, because they're going to turn and focus their entire attention back to where they actually started out, which is selling leads to REALTORS. They are not going away.

What does this mean? When lose something to Remax or eXp, you need to ask yourself:

Did I really lose that listing to those companies? Or did somebody go on Zillow, fill...

There's a new stat from the National Association of REALTORS, which states that 53% of our buyers and sellers now fall into a specific demographic group.

You can probably guess what that is...

It's the millennial generation.

Millennials aren't kids anymore. They're actually in their mid twenties or early thirties. They are definitely the driving force in the market. And they're far, far bigger than the baby boomer generation ever was.

So when we look at just statistically, the numbers of this, we have to embrace millennial marketing. It's super important.

And there's some things that we can do to do a much better job with them.

1. Social media

You know I was going to say that. That's where they're at. We've got to go where the audience is. That means we're doing 5 to 15 posts a week on different platforms that we know they use.

So some of you might be doing Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, you name it. You just got to figure out...

What if from every listing you take, you received five transactional sides? Imagine you take 10 listings in the next 12 months. And that leads to 50 transactional sides.

Is it possible? Absolutely.

And more importantly, we have to look at what we've done the last 12 months — how many listings did we take and how many sides did we create? If we are leaving money on the table, it's probably coming from the activities that we're not doing when it comes to our listings and those opportunities are so massive.

We have a system which I call the "5 Star Listing System" and it identifies the five easy transactions we can secure from every single listing we take.

1. We're going to sell the listing that we take

Now, that sounds simple in today's market. 95% of listings are selling as soon as they hit the market. But as the market transitions, as the market shifts, believe me, we're going to need to be able to refine our presentations and...

We just got stats that show listings have increased again. For the past several months, they've been increasing. And now they've increased again by another 4.1%.

So now we're about 2.6 months of supply in the country. Not a lot, but more than it's been in a long time.

So we're starting to see listings come back to market.

The question is: Are you starting to see more listings come into your portfolio?

If you're not, you have to ask yourself why.

The number one reason why we don't have as many listings as we should is we're just simply not asking for them. We're not asking enough people to give us listings as we should. And we're not asking for enough referrals.

I'll give you one technique that blew my mind recently that one of my students used. And I received it because I'm on his mailing list.

He sent me his resume, his resume letter, the resume letter had a cover letter, just like a regular resume. And on the cover letter, it...

The listing market is about to blow up. We've seen all kinds of stats around this. Everybody's looking at the same wave coming towards us. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

We know 77% of homeowners believe now's a good time to sell.

1 in 10 homeowner's plans to list in the next year. And 63% in the next six months.

Here are 5 things you must have to get ready for the super surge of listings that's about ready to break into your market right now:

1. An in-depth marketing plan

Now this is a step-by-step, point-by-point marketing plan that's unique to you. Not just your office, not your company, not your brand, but to you personally that you give to every seller.

If you haven't developed this, we've actually developed one for all of our coaching students, which will blow your mind. But you need to take some time to develop one yourself.

2. Recent testimonials

Have you collected those on an 8.5x11 piece of paper...

If I were to ask you, what is your business strategy right now? Would you be able to write it down in two or three sentences — your specific strategy and how you're approaching the marketplace?

If not, you may have an issue because you might be market-driven and we don't want to be market-driven.

Why?

Because a market is kind of a high tide floats all boats kind of situation. What happens when the tide's not with you? And you're kind of fighting the market.

That's where you're going into a danger zone. And none of us want to be there. As Vince Lombardi said:

"Hope is not a strategy."

We absolutely have to have a strategy to survive and thrive in this business.

And one of the biggest things that we should be doing every day is understanding that we have a job that probably most people don't identify with. And our number one job isn't sales.

Our number one job is data collection. That is adding people to our funnel so that we can...

There's a new study out that shows that 77% of homeowners believe now is a great time to sell their home.

And when you combine that with a recent study we talked about — which is that 1 in 10 homeowners is going to place their home on the market over the next 12 months. And 63% of those will do it in the next six months alone.

Question is:

What are you doing about it?

We know 80% of your business is going to come from a direct result of your sphere of influence. Either direct business or referred business. So we need to dive into that first and foremost.

I'm going to give you three ways to have impact at scale with these folks.

1. A weekly email into your database.

This doesn't cost you a dime, but it's one of the most powerful things you can do to stay top-of-mind.

But that email has to be value-orientated. It can't be garbage that people are going to look at it as spam. It has to be high value.

What's the highest...

What if there's one thing you could do that would have a massive impact on your business? And it was something that would feel like it wasn't work? It was almost rejection-proof. And it's something that you could do every single day. Would you like to know what it is?

The answer is networking. And what I mean by networking is going to coffee, dinner, drinks, lunch, breakfast, you name it. Whatever it is where you're meeting one-on-one with someone in your sphere of influence.

There's nothing more powerful than you can do for your business in terms of marketing than that.

Now it's not going to feel like you're doing anything — you're just having fun with somebody who you like to visit with. But by stretching yourself and meeting with more people in your sphere and getting outside your comfort zone, I can promise you the result of this will be referrals.

Now it's not instant gratification. It won't instantly happen. But when you...

Have you ever heard of Dave Ramsey? A lot of us have heard of Dave Ramsey but he is someone that wasn't super popular like five years ago. But over the last few years, boy, he's really taken a leadership position even within the real estate industry.

So who's Dave Ramsey? Dave Ramsey is a financial author, consultant, and coach. He has a podcast and hosts a radio program, which is highly syndicated across the country in many different media outlets.

What Dave Ramsey is doing is interesting. Because a lot of people don't know that he's now earning upwards of $40 million a year just in real estate referrals.

What he's doing is he positions himself as someone that's the expert. And then people come and say, hey, who does Dave Ramsey trust in each of the markets to list my home? He then collects a referral fee by referring agents to his audiences.

What a brilliant idea.

But what's really interesting about this when we take a hard...

What can you learn from Guns n Roses about real estate?

My wife and I took a road trip recently and I took the time to download a book for us to listen to. I don't think she was too impressed in the beginning, but she learned to love it. It was a great book by Duff McKagan talking about his experience as the bassist for Guns n Roses.

We learned his crazy biography of how he got started with the band and what he went through in his life. One thing that he talked about, which really fascinated me, was when Guns n Roses was beginning as a young LA band. They would have to go out and meet with club owners and lounge owners to try to talk them into using them as a band.

In other words, they had to sell themselves. And something the lounge owners and business owners did was instead of just paying these kids to come in and play -- and if they were terrible, make their guests run out -- they would make the bands pay them to play in the lounge or...