What percentage of Americans would you guess paid off their home?

Think about that for a second: Completely own their home, free and clear.

In other words, when you're driving down the street in your neighborhood, out of 10 homes, how many people have paid their home off and outright own it?

Would it be 2 homes, 3 homes, 4 homes?

The answer is 38% of Americans have paid off their home in full, which is absolutely amazing.

The equity for homes in America is off the charts. It's incredible. So that's good.

Now, why do I bring this up?

The reason I bring it up is because people that have equity in their home actually have a huge, powerful advantage when it comes to moving up to their dream home.

And here's why:

They can actually do something that a lot of sellers can't. They could go buy a home and finance their second home (what they're going to buy next). And they won't have two mortgages.

So they have no pressure on themselves when it...

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...

"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,...

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...

Should your buyer float their interest rate or lock now?

Interesting question. Some of you really gotta be working with your lender to have that conversation with them. But let me give you a little bit of what's been happening to date in January through roughly March 2021:

Let's look at the numbers and dig into them that I got from one of my lenders — who is an incredible rockstar in the lending world. His name is Brian Case and his team at Guild Mortgage gave me these numbers:

For the entire year of 2021 so far, a floating borrower — or somebody that took the gamble and threw the dice to see if they can get a better rate tomorrow than
they can get today — would've won 41% of the time. And they would have lost 58% of the time.

Because 48% of the time rates went down and 58% of the time they went up. So it's a gamble that may not be paying off.

Overall interest rates have gone up about a half percent since January....

Here's some great language to use with buyers as they're entering the market today. We know it's a high demand, low supply market.

But how do we coach them through this process?

One way is by using the "Auction Analogy." You can do this by talking about a list price as being almost like a reserve price. So the conversation (which you can see below), will give you a good way to help buyers understand what's happening in the market dynamics. You can simply say:

"Hey, now that you're entering the market, I just want to kind of give you a little overview of what's happening in terms of pricing and where sellers are at. We're in a very low supply market and a very high demand market. So, on average, sellers are receiving a least four offers per home. Now some receive less, some receive more. But in general, we're going to be competing for a buyer for a seller's love. We're going to be competing with other buyers. So we want to come in...

The National Association of REALTORS® shows that home affordability is better than it's been in the last four years.

So what does that mean?

It means that they measure what it would take for the median family in the country and their median income versus the median sales price and the interest rates that you would have to pay in this market. And they come up with how affordable it is to own a home.

The baseline number is 100. In other words, families have 100% of the median income needed to buy the median priced home in the marketplace.

Now guess what that number is today.

It's 187!

So homeowners on the median scale have 187% of what it would take for them to own a home in their marketplace.

Not only is this an amazing number, but it's much better than it was a year ago.

When we look at home prices going up, sometimes we can get in the trap of thinking that things are getting less affordable.

But the offset to this is interest...

Something interesting that you might find surprising that it relates to real estate, but fertility rates in the US have gone down dramatically over the last hundred years. In America today, we've actually had another 1% decrease.

We have the lowest birth rates than we've had in a hundred years.

Here are the numbers:

For every 1000 women in America aged between 15 and 44, there's 58.3 births. And you compare this to World War Two, when all the baby boomers were born, that number was more closer to 140 births! So huge difference in the numbers.

Now, how does this relate to real estate? I'm going to share with you now. Here is the the data today:

Looking at buyers who have children under the age of 18 in the home, the share of that group has declined from 58% in 1985, all the way down to 33% in 2020. So there's a much smaller group of people buying homes. It's actually the minority, not the majority, who have kids under 18 at home.

So you need to...

Have you ever heard of the aggregation of marginal gains? I hadn't either until I read a story about the British cycling teams winning the Tour de France. They never won the Tour de France before 2010. But their new coach, David Brailsford, challenged them to look at everything they're doing — even the smallest things — to see if there was a way to improve it.

They started with the typical things you'd look at like their diets and exercise programs. But then he went a step further — and started looking at the pillows cyclists were using, the exact time they fell asleep and woke up, their daily routines and more to give them insight into their overall training system.

They figured out that even a 1% increase in any area of efficiency would aggregate marginal gains and finally create wins.

You can do the same thing in your real estate career. You have so many different avenues you're managing, but just getting 1% better in each of these areas can create big wins for...

We see so much marketing that is irrelevant and meaningless — it doesn't resonate with anybody. It's trying to be ironic, cute, and Instagram perfect.

But nobody really cares so these marketing gimmicks fail.

What do our potential clients care about then?

Learning something new — which will always make them stop dead in their tracks and consider your message.

That's the basic idea behind my "Educational Marketing" strategy.

Now let's think of it in terms of real estate:

Not everyone has an interest in real estate. Buyers and sellers usually only get interested right before they're ready to sell their home or buy a new one.

So when a buyer starts to think that they should buy a house, that's when they start to look at all the terms and processes around real estate. Or when a homeowner gets interested in selling, that's when they suddenly get tuned into the market conditions.

That's the power behind using "Educational...