Okay guys, we all know that there's not enough listings to sell in our markets across the country, but there's still pretty strong buyer demand despite the interest rates. Every agent that I talk to has buyers, but their biggest struggle is finding buyers' homes. So what we need to look at is a deeper level, we'll call it, underneath where the market is seemingly at. We see that there's just, on the surface, it doesn't look like there's a lot of listings, but underneath that, just boiling underneath is what we can call shadow inventory.

I'm gonna give you a classic example:

I sold my house about a year ago, but for about six months leading up to that sale, I would have sold my house. And what I mean by that is we put the home on the market, you know, and we then sold the house. But I would have sold before that. If an agent had approached me and said, "I've got a buyer and I can sell your house today," I would have absolutely signed...

Hey guys, do you want to be a little bit more assertive, not aggressive, but assertive in your market? Let me give you a technique, a tip, and I love this idea. It came from one of my coaching students, and that is the idea of a real estate resume.

So, you are interviewing for a job when you're working for a buyer or a seller, and how many times in the real world, when you get a real job, you have to turn in a resume almost a hundred percent of the time. But what if you just become proactive and you create a real estate resume and you give it to everybody in your database? And you say, "Hey, I'm accepting new buyers and new listings for the spring market coming up, and I just thought I'd give you my real estate resume that you can share with your friends and family about my background as a realtor and my qualifications to help them with all their real estate needs. Here's a copy of it. Feel free to share it with your...

How many referrals did you send out last week to your favorite vendors in your market area? If the answer for most of you is a big fat goose egg, here's the problem:

The problem is you gotta put into place the power of reciprocity.

You start pushing out what you want to receive. Give, give, give, and eventually things will start coming back to you. It's just a natural thought, reciprocity.

We give because we want to be grateful and generous, and we know eventually good things will come back. But when you're not in that mindset of having abundance and you're closed up, you're not ready for opportunity. You have to open yourself up to opportunity by being the person that provides opportunity to others.

When you're out in the market, you're listening for opportunities to help people in your sphere of influence, people that you can help with their small businesses and what they're trying to get done in their lives. When...

How old were you when you moved out of your parents' house? And how old were you when you purchased your first home? New information from the National Association of REALTORS shares the latest data with us on the averages in the US. The average age of someone leaving their parents' house today is... drum roll... 26 years old. And the average age for them to purchase their first home is 34.

So I'm gonna challenge you. Put this out on a social media post and ask that question:

When's the first time you moved outta your parents' house? When did you buy your first house? You're gonna get a ton of responses. Then answer the question yourself like I did recently, and I got a huge response on this, and my answer was, I moved out at 17. I bought my first house at 19.

Then you might dig deeper and say, what's preventing you from taking that next step? If you have some people say, well, I'm not a homeowner yet. Get into that...

People that are doom and gloomers that think the sky's following, everything's going wrong, the market's never gonna come back are dead wrong. For one specific reason. And I'm gonna tell you why:

First of all, interest rates are coming down, demand's coming back. There are all kinds of leading indicators that say our spring and summer markets are gonna be incredible. But let me give you just a piece of information, which was shared with me recently, which I thought was absolutely fantastic and got me excited about the upcoming surge of activity we're gonna see in the next 5-10 years. We're gonna have this incredible run that's gonna be starting very soon. And I want you to be a part of it.

It's all about generational population basics. When we look at the baby boomer generation, which when I started in real estate, everything was about the baby boomers because they were just calming through the pipeline, buying up...

What's more important than the interest rate you're paying on a home?

It's the price you're paying for a home, obviously.

So when we're talking to our potential buyers, this is something we should be talking about with our social audiences, our sphere of influence, our farm areas, and really beating this drum that they need to refocus their attention on this idea that prices are coming down. And we have some real opportunities in the market.

The way we're gonna frame that up is gonna say:

"Hey, listen, a lot of people get really focused on interest rates. But I want you to start looking at price because some smart buyers that I know, some savvy buyers are really starting to get out there and find some incredible bargains. There's really two areas that I like to talk about with all my friends that I think are huge opportunities.

One of them is luxury housing. There's a 38% drop in the last quarter of 2022 in luxury home sales....

We are in a different marketplace, aren't we? The market totally rolled over into a buyer's market in a lot of price categories. And because of that, we need to hone our negotiation skills. So today I'm gonna give you 10 strategies to help you be a better negotiator. Because we know if a buyer feels good about the negotiation, they're gonna often be excited, and tell their friends and family to use use to purchase their next property.

Remember, it's all about referrals and doing an amazing job.

1. Discovering the motivation

It's simple, but it's interesting how many agents haven't done that. We just had an offer come into my office over $2 million and guess what? It was electronically sent without a phone call to the other agent. Very frustrating experience for the listing agent. But this is the example of a lot of buyer's agents that don't have any training. They're not calling the other listing agent and asking simple...

Hey guys, we've got some good news regarding the real estate market, and that is Fannie Mae does a study, it's a purchase sentiment study. They do it every single month. And finally it's broken the downward trend.

All the way since back in February of 2022, there's just been this downward trend with sentiment among buyers and sellers about the market, about buying, about selling. And it really hit a low point here in the last couple months, but it's broken. Now it's starting to come back up.

Buyers and sellers are now seeing a little bit of a rainbow at the end of the tunnel here. They're saying the worst is behind us, and it's starting to look a little bit better.

So this is good news for us. We're gonna combine that with another piece of good news, which is affordability.

So affordability over the last couple of months has gotten way better. We had an interest rate peak, and now it's come down, down, down, down, down, and it's...

Hey guys, as you're preparing for the new year, you should start to think about what you can do differently for 2023 that you have never done before?

A lot of you have a listing presentation. Some of you have a buyer presentation. Some of you have a pre-listing kit and a pre-meeting buyer kit for buyers. And a lot of you don't have those things.

But if you do have those things and you're saying, what's the next thing I could add to my overall mix of marketing materials?

I'm gonna give you an idea right now:

It's called my "success portfolio."

If you were gonna go to an architect, photographer, or even a baker or wedding planner, when you go into those places and you talk to them about doing business, a lot of times they'll bring out their portfolio. And their portfolio is kind of a graphic representation of what they've done. A visual representation of what they've done in the past for other clients.

So the...

A recent study by Bloomberg shows that by 2040 electric vehicles will make up the majority of new car sales worldwide, and account for 33% of all the light duty vehicles on the road.

Because of that, electric charging stations at homes are gonna become more and more and more valuable.

So think about this when you're working with a builder or somebody that's doing a remodel or flip on a home. Would it be important, would it be something valuable to add that charting a station to the property as a way to create more value in that property to a pretty large segment—and growing—segment of home buyers?

By the way, an upgrade in capacity for electrical load, according to Seth Cutler, is that it's gonna cost between about $1,500 and $7,500 to upgrade your electrical system to handle that capacity.

But what can you get back when you sell the property? Well, we don't know that hasn't been studied. But we do know that it's among...