One thing that we should do this year is cut the dead wood.

What does that mean?

It means we don't wanna be walking up a mountain, our mountain being our figurative goal set that we've set for ourselves and have a backpack full of rocks on our back.

Now, what is that backpack full of rocks?

Those are clients that don't wanna sell, that don't wanna buy, that are wasting your time, that are frustrating, that are angry people that we do not need to be carrying around on our backs anymore.

We need to cut them loose and work with people that really wanna buy and sell.

So going into the new year, how can we approach our business a little bit differently?

One is to work with ready and willing clients which sounds crazy, but it is so simple that it's obvious, right?

We need to work with ready and willing clients.

Having a ready and willing conversation is important. So I'm gonna give you my "ready and willing" conversation script when I'm...

I want to talk to you about what I call the algorithm of sales. And what that means is that there's some base numbers in our industry, that if you embrace them, it can unlock unlimited opportunity.

The problem is most agents don't want to embrace them. They just want somebody to hand them a buyer or seller. Or for a buyer or seller to literally lay down in front of them so they can just start working with them.

Guys, that doesn't work.

You have to go out there and work the numbers if you want to do well.

I'm going to give you six numbers that are going to be just what I would call standard in the industry that you have to embrace for you to have success.

1. For every 30 conversations you have, you'll average one closing.

So if you want to make 300, 400, 500, $600,000 a year, you just have to figure out how many closings you need. And then multiply that number by 30, which will tell you how many conversations you need to have in...

If you have a gap in your income right now and you're out of escrows, what's the cause of that?

The cause isn't anything you're doing right now.

It's not the market conditions.

It's not something you just did yesterday or the day before.

It's actually something you've done 90 days ago.

Whenever I do this with my coaching students when they're having a gap in closings, I tell them to look back to 90 days ago.

What were you doing 90 days ago? Let's really look at the calendar and open it up. When we open up that calendar, we'll inevitably see a gap.

Maybe they went on vacation. Maybe they just took a few weeks off because something was going on in their lives and they stopped prospecting 90 days ago. And that's what comes forward like a snake eating an egg. It just travels down the timeline and then boom, it blows up resulting in them having no escrows in the moment.

So how do we eliminate this situation so we don't have gaps in the future?

It's...

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 your power base?

Have you ever heard that term before? Well, your power base is a measurement and it's a great measurement that all of us should understand and really work towards improving over the course of the next 12 months.

So here's what it is:

It's the amount of sales your database is producing every year per member. So I'm going to give you an example to kind of put this in perspective:

Let's say you have a guy named John. John's a realtor has been in the business for years. Let's say John sold 22 homes last year. And his database size was 232. So we had 232 people on his database, created 22 closed signs last year. He can simply divide the 232 by 22 and this gives him his power base number, which is 10.5.

What does that mean? That means for every 10 and a half people in his database, he's averaging one closed sale.

What's the national average?

It's about 10. So if you're doing 10 and a half, your database...

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...

Now we've all heard of supply chain issues hitting the entire country. Lots of things happening because of COVID breaking down the supply chains.

But is this impacting real estate?

It absolutely is impacting real estate. It's impacting builders. It's impacting all kinds of vendors that are tied to real estate.

My wife and I are remodeling a house and we've had to wait six months for the cabinets to come in. It's impacting remodeling and flipping and all kinds of areas that we don't necessarily consider tied to the supply chain.

But real estate is definitely one of those areas.

So how can we use this?

Here's one way we can use it when we're out prospecting is talking about supply chain issues because everybody can identify with it right now.

So you might just say:

"Hey, you know, what, can you do me a huge favor? Even real estate is facing supply chain issues. We're facing very low inventory compared to most years and huge buyer...

At this time last year, 46% of sellers were offering some kind of incentive to buyers to encourage them to make an offer on their house over the competition.

Now, those incentives could have been anything from closing costs, down payment assistance, home warranties, pre-paying for services. There were lots of different incentives that could have been thrown into the mix.

But this year that number has dropped down to 26%. But this is still a very high number.

And you can describe this to sellers like this: 

"Hey, listen, it might be kind of surprising, but about one out of every four of sellers that we're competing with in the marketplace is actually offering an incentive to the buyer to encourage them to make an offer on their home. So it's something for us to consider. We got a great price, but maybe that would make our home stand out just a little bit more is thinking about an incentive.

Let me describe what could mean:

If you know people in your sphere of influence that own investment property, I've got some good news. Also, if you own an investment property, I've got good news. And if you're trying to sell investment property, I've got good news:

The investment property side of our business is going through a real resurgence right now. We knew during COVID they got kinda hit. We know the eviction moratoriums made it really tough for them. But now we're starting to see people come back out of that.

So here's a few good numbers in that arena that come from us from the NAR economist blog:

Two of them are dealing with absorption rates. Absorption rates, meaning how many units are being absorbed by the market.

In Q2 and Q3 of this year, 700,000 units were absorbed by this market. It's a lot of units, but completely instantly absorbed by the market.

Vacancy rates have fallen in 2011-ish from 6.9 back then all the way down to 4.6 now. That's a nationwide...

This week, we got some great information from NAR and some good news for the market.

We've had this kind of trending downline with home sales across the country. Now we've had a sharp turn in sales:

Sales are up 7% compared to September.

So why would we have this kind of dramatic increase in sales right now coming into fall?

There's a couple of key reasons:

1. There's more listings coming to market

We're seeing more listings coming to market every single month. The market is building with listings right now, which means buyers can finally find what they're looking for. So if you've got buyers on the sidelines, encourage them to come back in, because now there's more and more listings piling in. And there's listings coming back on the market as well.

2. Interest rates have stayed low

But the biggest reason why buyers are coming back to the market?

3. Prices are moderating

People are finally bringing their prices down to meet the market. And...