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...

What is Q2?

Well, Q2 is your most valuable asset. And you might not even know it.

Your most valuable asset is your database, your sphere of influence, we know that.

But what's Q2 mean?

Q2 represents the quality and the quantity of your database. So let's look at those two issues and how they can impact your bottom line coming into the new year.

Let's start with the quantity. What does that mean? Well, if we know that for every 10 people in our database, we'll average one closed sale, knowing that quantity makes a big difference. In fact, when I talk to agents on a regular basis, and I ask, how many transactions did you close last year? And they say 10, 12, I'll say, how big is your database? Let me guess. It's probably 80 to 120 am I right? Most people will say, yeah, you're right on the money.

Why?

Because your database is a reflection of your performance. Smaller database, smaller performance. Larger database, larger...

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...

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...

Hey guys, quick question:

Are you a global REALTOR or a local REALTOR?

What do I mean by that? I just had a phone call from a guy that I worked with years ago. His name is Dick and he's an amazing guy. He called me and said, Jim, I've got a referral for you. He's living down in San Diego now. But we haven't seen or talked to each other in 15-20 years, but he has a referral for me.

Now, keep in mind: Dick is 83 years old and still out there selling real estate — so congratulations to Dick.

But when he referred that client to me, it just made me remember this concept of being a global realtor versus a local realtor.

Sometimes I have agents come to me that are in coaching and they say: 

"I've got my database, but it includes some people from my hometown or from a town I moved away from years ago, maybe in Texas, Florida, LA, or New York. Should I keep these people that are not local in my database? Why would I spend money...