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...

Only 16% of buyers believe it's a good time to buy a home today. That's according to a new study from Fannie Mae. So when we hear that number, it's kind of a shocking number and it's a record low. Let's not put any sugar on this. It's not good.

So when we're talking to our clients that may have thought about buying but are on the fence right now, how can we have just an honest conversation about the market today?

Well, I like this idea of a "then versus now" conversation. The "then versus now" conversation is dealing with real world numbers. And so let's assume you have a situation where you say, "Hey listen, I know you're kind of on the fence about buying right now, but I just wanna walk you through something to think about. If you were back in time six months ago when we started talking about buying, and you bought a house back then, let's just run through some numbers. I'm gonna compare that to where we're...

What's the number one reason somebody should be buying a home now as opposed to waiting?

Number one reason is this:

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for NAR at a recent conference said this. He said that it's totally within the realm of possibility that we'll see interest rates at eight and a half percent interest next year in 2023.

Why? We know the Fed has already announced they're gonna do another rate increase in November and another one after that, then they're gonna take a pause. So two more increases are coming and we're already at 7%, eight and a half, maybe a low estimate. So when, although we feel like the interest rate is high, it's not high relative to history. Remember the average interest rate over the last 50 years has been 8%. We're at 7%. So when we look at it from a historical standpoint, it's not as high as we perceive it.

We perceive it to be high because we're basing it on the 60 year low. We just live to...

News from NAR (National Association Realtors) came out recently and they said that home sales are down 23.8%. But strangely, home prices are up 8.4%. So where's the conflict there? How are we having these crazy numbers?

Well, here's the reality — there's two reasons for it:

One is that we are still benefiting from appreciation that happened at the beginning of the year when interest rates were close to 3%.

And the second reason?

We're benefiting from low supply. We still are at a historically low supply, about 3.3 months of supply. Meaning if every REALTOR stopped working today, it would take 3.3 months of time for us to sell out that inventory.

So what's a healthy balance market? A healthy balance market is about six months of supply.

By the way, I want you to get this in your mind. It's completely different than the Great Recession. We entered the great recession with 11 months of supply. Strong buyer's market. We are...