Here's a shocking number:

For every listing in America right now, on average, those sellers, when the listing goes live, are getting 4.8 offers. Let's call it five offers per listing.

It's truly one of the best times in history to put a home on the market, but will this be changing soon?

The answer is yes.

What will change this dynamic is a buyer's ability to afford the house. And what's impacting that right now is interest rates.

Interest rates are rising rapidly, approaching 5% in a lot of markets. And with that, it's pricing a lot of buyers out of the market. And if they're not priced out of the market, it's for them to readjust what they can afford downward. They can't afford that high price because the interest rate won't allow it.

So when we're looking at working with sellers, we need to tell them there's a five alarm fire going on in the real estate industry right now.

And it's interest rates. They're rising so rapidly that...

Some pretty amazing news from CoreLogic this week shows that the average American in the country had an equity gain of drum roll

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$55,300.

That's more than a lot of people making a year with their normal wage.

So that's a huge increase. That's why real estate's one of the number one wealth pullers in America is this equity buildup.

Now, if you happen to be on the west coast where I live, it's even greater. And in a lot of areas of the country, it's even greater. For instance, in Washington state, that number was $95,000. Where I live here in Oregon, it was $59,000. And if you happen to live in California, one of the highest equity gains in the country, $117,000 in equity gain. Now, what do we do with this information?

Well, one thing we can do is do a social media post or an email out to our entire database.

And here's what we might say:

"Hey, your home is better than average, right? The average...

How are you incubating leads once you've captured them? One of the best strategies you can have is having an email marketing campaign.

What a lot of the top producers in the country do is they use Constant Contact or Mailchimp.com and these are systems that are super easy, point and click, that you can build an email newsletter and send out. Some people use BombBomb if they wanna do a video version of it.

But all of these are email related. Now, why wouldn't they just do social media where it seems like all the action is well?

Remember when you do a social media post, that's only gonna be in front of maybe 2 to 4% of your audience.

You're not gonna have a hundred percent of your audience receiving the message. But with the email marketing, literally a hundred percent of your audience receives your message.

So that's a huge advantage, right? And that's something that we can use.

Now not of 'em are gonna open it, but certainly they're gonna...

I'm gonna give you two techniques today that can really transform what you're doing on social media.

Why?

Because a lot of agents on social media are doing the same old, boring posts. They're not getting a lot of engagement. Nobody really cares. Nobody's really watching. And so they wonder why they're struggling and other agents are doing so well.

There's a few reasons.

Now one is that people are seeing repetitive posts. They're seeing the same posts from the same REALTORS over and over and over again. And they get boring. They just become noise. So how can you break through?

I'm gonna give you two strategies right now:

1. Educational marketing

Educational marketing means you're teaching somebody. So you're the teacher, they're the student. We're experts in this industry. And we could come up with a list of a hundred things we could talk about about the real estate market easily that other people outside the industry don't know.

We could...

A couple interesting stats are coming out. And they show that we have a new generation that's upon us.

And I'm gonna start with the first stat, which is talking about young adults.

So young adults (adults described as 25 to 34) have come back to live at home. Now in 2020, this hit an all time high —17.8% of young adults, 24 to 30 came back home to live with their parents. That's the highest it's been since 1960 guys.

And last year in 2021, it still was 17%, which was the second highest year since 1960.

So that's one side of what some people are starting to call the "sandwich generation."

Now who's in the middle of the sandwich? Guys like me. People that are 44 to 60 years old—I'm 52 right in the middle. So we got our kids coming home, but who's coming on the other side? Potentially older parents, right?

So parents that are maybe 60, 70, 80 years old also might need to come and be a part of the family, right?

...

A few of you are suffering from what I call referral resistance. What's referral resistance mean? It means you've got a pretty good size database of people, a sphere of influence, and it's not performing well.

In other words, you're not getting a lot of referrals. Your sphere of influence isn't sending you buyers and sellers.

Why?

It's because the people in your sphere don't quite trust you enough. They don't quite see you as the expert that you know you are. And because of that, there's resistance to sending you referrals.

So how can you overcome referral resistance?

I'm gonna give you three quick techniques to help you with that:

1. You have to be the experts in their minds, not yours.

How do you do it? You need to be giving them information regularly about the real estate market. Now, this is super easy to do because you are given information all the time. One of the places you are given information from is your local MLS system....

There's a great book I'm gonna recommend to you called Influence by Robert Cialdini. In the book, he talks about the power of sales language. And how your language, when you're selling can have such a massive impact on your performance.

We tend to just wing it in this business. We tend not to know our lines. And we just kind of think that our sheer great personality is always gonna win the day. But that's a mistake. Just like any true professional, we should memorize some things in the real estate industry.

Not that everything's canned and everything's planned. But there are some things we need to memorize.

When you think about the highest paid professionals in any the industry—whether it's a doctor, whether it's an attorney, whether it's a CPA—do those three professions have to memorize some things in order to pass their bar exam and their accountants exams and all their other exams?

Absolutely. And you better hope that...

I did a class recently, teaching in Southern California. And I conducted a random study during the class. And we were talking about the aspect of being a "hyperlocal agent." Maybe you've heard that term before.

This is where you're connecting, not just with the people in your community, but the community itself. Because if you think about yourself as a person that might move to a new area, what will be the first thing you do?

First thing you're doing is Googling it, right? You're gonna hop on the internet and you're gonna Google that place. You're gonna check it out and you're gonna research it. And the keywords you use for your search would be the city name, right?

But you know, the other place that everyone's gonna go is not just Google, but also YouTube.

That's what I do every time I'm going on vacation, I'm checking out hotels. I'm looking at the air to get a feel for it. I'm YouTubing the heck out of it, right?

So we did a little search for...

Lawrence Yun was recently quoted as saying, "If you are under the age of 40, you have never seen inflation this high in this country."

The inflation rate in November hit a record 6.8%. That's the highest we've seen in decades.

So when we look at these numbers and everybody's talking about inflation, how does this relate to estate?

It's an interesting conversation. It's something that we should talk about with our clients.

Here's the good news when it comes to real estate:

Real estate is a tremendous asset and a hedge against inflation. That's why last year, we saw a record number of people investing in real estate. In fact, it was the the highest recorded ever. The percentage of homes purchased was 18.2% were sold to investors.

One reason is they're using it as a hedge against inflation.

So here's what's happened according to Lawrence Yun. He says that real estate has proven to be a good hedge against inflation. Some examples:

In the 1970s,...

What is Q2?

Well, Q2 is your most valuable asset. And you might not even know it.

Your most valuable asset is your database, your sphere of influence, we know that.

But what's Q2 mean?

Q2 represents the quality and the quantity of your database. So let's look at those two issues and how they can impact your bottom line coming into the new year.

Let's start with the quantity. What does that mean? Well, if we know that for every 10 people in our database, we'll average one closed sale, knowing that quantity makes a big difference. In fact, when I talk to agents on a regular basis, and I ask, how many transactions did you close last year? And they say 10, 12, I'll say, how big is your database? Let me guess. It's probably 80 to 120 am I right? Most people will say, yeah, you're right on the money.

Why?

Because your database is a reflection of your performance. Smaller database, smaller performance. Larger database, larger...