There's something happening in the market right now that really will impact your sellers. And that is interest rates are starting to climb a little bit.

When interest rates climb, it affects sellers in two different key ways:

1. It affects what's called buying power of all the buyers in the marketplace.

Here's what that looks like when you're talking about buying power:

If you're a buyer who is going to get a loan of, let's say $300,000, and you had your average down payment that would equal a payment and interest charge of about $1,225 per month. Now that interest rates have come up about a half percent, what does that mean for you?

If you still want to have that same payment, roughly $1225 a month of principal and interest, your buying power actually goes down because interest rates have gone up. You can no longer afford the $300,000 mortgage. Now you can only afford $285,000.

This puts "pricing pressure" on the market.

Now we know...

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...

Let's say you have an active, qualified buyer who wants to live in a certain neighborhood. But you've shown them everything and can't find what they're looking for.

One technique to try is to identify any for sale by owners in that market that are either new for sale by owners or what I call "legacy" for sale by owners. Meaning, people that were on the market three, four, five, six months ago, even as much as a year ago.

We give you some great techniques to do that over erealestatecoach. But then the question is, what do we do once we are making the call to these for sale by owners?

What do we say to let them let us in the door? I'm going to give you the script that I'm going to put it down below. So you have it. And if you like this script, and you'd like to see more, I can share with you where you can find more of these scripts. But here is the script:

"Good morning. I noticed you have a home for sale in Laurelwood. And just wondering if...

Why would you use a pending sign? A lot of REALTORS use a pending sign because they want to encourage people to list their home with them. And they want to show off to the marketplace that their marketing actually worked.

But a pending sign can actually be the worst possible thing you can do for your marketing.

Why?

Because when homeowners in your neighborhood see your listing go up, that's when they're most likely to call you and be curious about the home. The pending sign can help a little bit, but you're going to miss out on the most qualified buyers you can have. 

And I'll give you a classic example:

My wife and I have identified an area of town we want to live in called Echo of the Pines. It's a beautiful area with some nice homes in the neighborhood but very few homes come on the market. The other night when we were driving home, we saw a new for sale sign. As a REALTOR, I get all these alerts, but they become noise and I tune them out.

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...

According to Barron's magazine "The Mother of all Bidding Wars is Coming" 

They point to several key factors:

• The Mortgage Bankers Association Purchase Index for the week ending on June 5 was up 13% from the same week a year ago.
•  Robert Shiller, who predicted that house prices in the suburbs would rise faster than those in city centers in coming years, as buyers, now practiced at working from home, seek more social-distancing space.

• Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin (RDFN) says traffic growth for his online listings for houses in suburbs and small towns has outpaced that for in big cities by 164% over the past two months.

• Inventory of existing homes for sale was the lowest on record for the month, according to the National Association of Realtors. And bank forbearance has reduced foreclosures, further restricting supply. How do you thrive in a low supply market?

Watch this video for tips on working with buyers and sellers when inventory is at all time low and bidding...