Hey guys, what if I told you that today may be a better time to sell your home than even last year when rates were 4%?

Let me give you the data (and a script you can use):

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“According to the National Association of REALTORS, home prices are now only $4,000 away from their all time high last June, and we are at 11% less inventory than we were at that time.

The other great thing that is happening in this market is that sellers are now back to getting 100% of our asking price on average in our market. And get this: 37% of sellers are selling for over full price.

So this is a market that is a great market for sellers in most price bands. If you're thinking about selling, I'd love to chat with you. I'd love to have you send me a text or a quick call.

Let's talk about what it might look like for you to put your home on the market.”

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That's the script I want you to use. That's the script I want you to put out because...

If you want a fun (and impactful) message to put on through your marketing channels, try something like this:

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Hey guys, want a surprising real estate market statistic?

Here it is:

35.2% of sellers are receiving over full price when they close on a transaction.

Despite the talk of a real estate recession, it's a different kind of market. Low inventory due to sellers holding onto their homes with great interest rates has created strong demand. When a house hits the market, sellers are getting incredible activity and many are selling for over asking price.

So, if you or someone you know is thinking about selling, now is the time.

It's actually a great time to sell a home, contrary to what the news media may say. The market is unique and unlike anything we've seen before. Don't let the headlines mislead you.

I'm here to help you navigate this market and discuss any real estate questions or concerns you may have....

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...

Now, this is happening a lot:

Buyers are getting skittish about interest rates, especially when they're in the middle of a transaction and their interest rates floated up because they didn't lock in the beginning.

See, a lot of buyers are gamblers. And they're optimists. So when they come into the transaction, they don't necessarily lock right out of the gate and they're gambling that the interest rates will come back down or float back down. But that gamble has not been a good gamble for the last several months.

And so interest has climbed, climbed, climbed. But if you do have that situation where you have a buyer that's had an interest rate that went beyond what they were expecting, it can create a mid-transaction negotiation.

So what you can do is you can come back to the other side and say, "Hey, we have a buyer that was completely excited about buying your house. Unfortunately, interest rates have kind of gone...

What is the picky inspection?

Now, for years we've been in a seller's market. And the last thing we wanted an inspector to do is to come in and kill the deal, right? But today the market is shifting towards buyers. And buyers are starting to gain more and more leverage in the marketplace.

So when I'm counseling my buyers, I might say, "You know, we wanna get an inspection. That's a fair inspection. But I'm kind of leaning towards advising my inspector to be a little bit more picky than they might have been in the past. Let me tell you why:

Because what we're doing when we do an inspection is really looking at health and safety issues and really big structural issues. You know, the roof is going bad, or there's a bad foundation, or something like that. The minor stuff, the things like just noting the age of a water heater and you know that there's a crack in the sidewalk and you know, the basic stuff, the cosmetic stuff is...

Hey guys, have you ever heard of a blended interest rate?

A blended interest rate is gonna become really important to a lot of us selling real estate in the coming months and years as these high interest rates stick with us.

So here's what a blended interest rate is:

Imagine a buyer has a budget, and they're gonna go out and buy, let's say, a $700,000 house. They have $100,000 down, and now they have $600,000 they're gonna finance. But they can't quite swing the high interest rates that are out there today. It's just gonna put 'em in a place where they can't afford it.

But they're willing to be creative and if you have a seller that's going to be creative, you can still put this deal together.

So here's an example:

Let's say that they were able to go out and get a first mortgage for $400,000 at the current interest rate. Let's call that 7.5%, which is probably where it's headed pretty quick. And the seller was willing to carry a...

Here's something that's come off the table over the last few years:

And that is the idea of an owner carrying their contract. We don't hear that term anymore because interest rates became so low, that no one would consider carrying a contract. Well with interest rates rising, this conversation would be something that we should be having with sellers now again.

And that conversation could be as simple as this:

"Hey, Mr. And Mrs. Seller, I just have a quick question. You guys have a pretty good equity position in your house. And just one thought came to mind. As interest rates are rising for typical mortgage rates, have you guys ever considered carrying a contract yourself? In other words, acting as the bank. This is where somebody would offer you a down payment, large enough to pay off your note that you have now and pay all the fees and everything else that's associated with the closing.

"But then after that, you'd have an income...

Here's some information that I think is super powerful that really no one talks a lot about. But it absolutely will impact you and I as REALTORS.

From 1968 to 2000, the average building in the country was 1.5 million new units. That's a long history there, 1968 to 2000. From 2000 to 2010, that number dropped to about 1.28 million units. Okay. Then we had a big building boom during the run up to the Great Recession. But then it collapsed and builders stopped building at all.

At the end of the day, when you add all those numbers together, what you find, and what analysts have found is that we are not building enough homes by a mile, right? And in fact, in order for us to just meet the supply demands of the country, we need to add 5.5 million housing units to our current inventory out there. And if we don't do that, we're gonna have perpetual low supply, which leads to higher prices and leads to kind of the market that...

Here's an interesting question that we often get:

If I buy a house and sell a house in the same market, am I gonna give up some equity? Am I gonna make a mistake by doing that?

Well, generally when you're buying and selling a house in the same market, you're not gonna have any equity loss because you're just moving money from one house to the other. And actually in our current market, we have something kind of unique happening in a lot of areas of the country. Really it's a tale of two markets or maybe three markets.

But when you look at your market, it's not just one big market, right? It's broken down by price bands. And there's some price categories that are much hotter. They're much more active. People are much more engaged and that would typically be the lower price categories, right?

The first time home buyer categories. But as you move up that ladder to the second per home purchase, so maybe the starter luxury and the real...

Here is a crazy stat that will be interesting for your sellers when you're sitting down to talk about a listing:

84% of the properties coming on the market are selling in less than 30 days across the country.

Now I would encourage you to dive deeper into your own local MLS and see what the number is for your local MLS. But it's probably gonna be somewhere in that neighborhood.

Now, another inverse number to that is what percentage of properties are staying on the market longer than six months? When you go back to 2011, that number would've been about 35%. Today, it’s 2%.

2% listings coming in the market are staying on for longer than six months.

You can just see how the market is so strong right now for sellers and how it's such an advantage to put your home on the market today as a seller.

Another great number to pair with these numbers is the fact that on average sellers are receiving 4.8 offers per listing. That's coming on the...