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...

How long do people stay in their homes? It's an interesting question. And it's a question that's related to marketing for us.

Prior to 2008, the average person stayed in their home five years before they moved on. So quite a bit of turnover there.

From 2008 to 2016, that number moved up to eight years.

And now that number has gone even higher — it's now 10.6 years.

So why are people staying in their homes longer? Well, there's lots of reasons.

The Great Recession had an impact. Super low interest rates have an impact. Having less inventory in the markets for people to move up to and change homes has also made a big impact.

But one question we should know and ask our clients is how about our local market? How about with our own sphere? What does that look like for the people that you're actually doing business with?

It's a great text. It's a great social media post to ask this question:

"The average homeowner spends 10.6...

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...

How are you positioning yourself on social media to have impact?

A lot of us are doing a lot of social media, but is it having impact? Are people remembering you or are they just scrolling past your posts because they're filled with meaningless fluff?

If you want to have impact, here's one technique that'll really help you shine in your marketplace:

Storytelling.

Telling a story about your client's experience and what your clients are going through will help you build a relationship with people that are in your audience. It positions you as the expert, as the authority, as a trusted figure, as an advisor, as a counselor. But it will also help people remember you as a REALTOR.

Why?

Because stories are remembered. Stories create resonance and connections with other people. People love reading about people.

So I'm gonna give you a couple of examples of that:

I've got a couple of my great coaching students that I work with in my company....

What is educational marketing?

Educational marketing is one of the most powerful techniques you can use to build trust and unlock more buyers and sellers for your business.

But how do you do it?

Well, you got to understand that a lot of expert marketers use what's called "The Curiosity Gap." That's where you pose a question or you put a statement out there and then it makes people curious about knowing the answer.

Now we fall into this curiosity gap all the time — from headlines to news soundbites that are trying to get you to watch the news at six o'clock, book covers, wine labels, and all kinds of things create curiosity in us. But when we look at our knowledge quest as human beings, we're always driven by not knowing and the power of wanting to know what we don't know, right?

So here's an example of this:

One of my good friends, Scott Lewis, a superstar realtor that I work with put this post out. And it was simply about the...

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...

Want to take a lot of listings rapidly?

The trick to do this is by targeting pre-foreclosure properties. There's 2.7 million homes in America today that are in a pre-foreclosure status. That number is so high because a lot of people have applied for a forbearance due to the COVID crisis, the struggling economy, and not being able to make their house payments.

A forbearance is where the lender gives the owner an opportunity to restructure their loan so they can either move or skip payments then make a balloon payment at the end.

But a lot of people are going into default because they're not able to get caught back up.

Here's the latest numbers we found from principal economist, Yanling Mayer from CoreLogic:

39.1% of all forborne loans are now 150 days behind payment. And 25% are 180 days past due.

Now, I don't say this to scare you that we're in 2009 again. The sky is not falling — and there are many differences between the market we were in then...

50% of clients can't remember their agent's name 6 months after closing.

In order to avoid falling into that group, you need a system of steps to follow after closing that captures people for the long haul. In this video, I'm going to explain four strategies to do this and reveal a simple system you can implement today. It's called the "3-7-30-1 System" and it will make it impossible to be forgotten by your clients.

The 3 stands for Day 3 After Closing.

We already know we should provide a closing gift and ask for reviews and recommendations after closing. That's not what we're talking about today. Instead, we're talking about having a follow-up system that makes it impossible to forget you.

So on Day 3, you want to call or text your clients and say, "Hey, I just want to follow up with you since it's been a few days since we closed. Often my clients find that if things are going to go wrong, they go wrong in the first weeks of ownership. Because of...