 Hey, what's up guys? I hope you're doing super well. Welcome to February. Man, we made it through the first month of 2022. Comment below and let me know if your 2022 is as incredible as you imagined it would be. Okay. For me, it is, right? Even though I've only closed two deals and, you know, I had Corona already and stuff like that. I'm still incredibly optimistic here and excited about the rest of the year. I'm excited about what happened in January. I definitely turn the corner and flip to the next chapter on many, many things. All the businesses that are kind of brewing underneath, right? Underneath the surface that you guys don't know about are doing incredibly well and I'm just overly excited about the future and what's to come. Not only for me, okay, but for the industry as a whole, I see nothing but incredible optimism and incredible opportunity for each and every real estate agent out there. Okay. I think you guys just need to find the holes in the markets. Okay. I think that, you know, you can't sit around and say, sellers don't want to sell because they don't have anything to buy. That's the wrong hole. I think you should be looking at, okay, let's do some handwritten letters and find some sellers who need to sell for whatever reason. Let's go after absentee owners who don't have to replace that property with something else and can take some profits off the table. Let's go after some investors who may be looking to liquidate in this really high market before things turn around and things will turn around at some point. Things are never going to go the same direction forever. The market is a cycle and we have to take advantage of every single step, every single stage of that cycle. There's plenty of holes in the market at all times. Okay. If you're not doing well where you are, move to a different strategy quickly. Okay. Find something that works for you and go all in with it and fully commit. Okay. That's what you got to do. If you want to really break through in this market, now I'm really excited about zero to diamond.com. We made it a social media platform. There's already over 5,000 members on the platform right now and people are collaborating there. Right. It's incredible to see the collaboration going on in the platform and the people that are taking the 60 day challenge. So it's February 1st. We all should be halfway through the 60 day challenge and I'm hearing nothing but incredible feedback. We're also coaching one-on-one coaching, completely free 110 agents right now where we call them once a week for 30 minutes to check in with them and help them through the 60 days. We're going to start another round of that April 1st. So if you would like to apply for that, that's at zero to diamond.com as well. So really excited about all that. Next Tuesday, we're going to do a fireside chat in the zero to diamond discord with Shane Novelin. This guy has closed 100 deals in his first 20 months in the business. So I'm excited to sit down with him on discord live. That's Tuesday, 4 p.m. central. And I'm going to be doing live calls again next Friday, 4 p.m. central. And you guys like the two agents, the two agents during one session. So I'm going to try that again. And I'm going to have a raffle there in the discord that you can apply for your chance to win a spot during those live calls. So a lot of stuff going on there and super excited about it. I wanted to share with you guys an article here from Inman. And it's actually not an article. It's just like an email newsletter if you will. It's called the rap. If you guys get the rap from Inman. And listen, let me go on record and say that I love Inman. I get a lot of my information from Inman. They do an incredible job keeping us up to date with the market and what brokerages have got going on. And I mean, it's incredible what they do. So I want to, I want to give kudos to them for the job that they do on the flip side to get articles like this every once in a while. And it really kind of makes me scratch my head and wonder what exactly are they trying to do here? You know, I know they don't have bad intentions for real estate agents, but they really strike some fear. And I mean, if I were a new agent reading this, you know, I would be thinking what, you know, I'm going to be out of a job soon. If I, if I'm an agent reading this article, so about a week and a half ago I get this, the subject line is record number of realtors plus low inventory equals uh-oh. What is the uh-oh? You know, right there, they're just setting the tone that this is bad. Okay. Record number of realtors, low inventory. This is a bad thing. You know, I don't know if that, if I like uh, you know, how they're crafting this so far. Okay. So basically in a nutshell, um, what they're saying is, is that from about a year and a half ago to now we're up 200,000 agents in the US. Well, that's part of the national association of realtors. We're at 1.6 million. Okay. Last July, we were at 1.4 million. So we're up 200,000 agents. That's crazy, right? Since the pandemic started. So naturally, if we have an influx of hundreds of thousands of agents in the country, okay, naturally that's going to cause transactions per agent to go down a little, right? That's average transactions per agent. Okay. And so basically they're coming in here and painting this really doom and gloom picture around this data. And I really didn't understand why. I mean, the data is great. Give me the data. Tell me there's 200,000 more agents. Tell me that transactions per agent went down, but don't craft the email that makes, that scares people, right? I understand that part of it. But I take everything with a grain of salt and I take these articles and I extract the data that, that I need out of these, these articles and use them, right? But, um, and here's, here's an example, right? Uh, they released on Thursday that, that NAR had, NAR was up 6.9% from the same day a year ago. Also on Thursday, Zilla released the new data showing that active home inventory drop below a million in December. Okay. So less than a million homes for sale in December. Okay. And they say that's a nearly 41% drop than inventory levels two years earlier. Okay. Why are they going back two years? Why not give me last year? Well, because last year was probably really close to the same. We've been dealing with this low inventory situation for quite a while and 41 sounds a lot scarier of a number. So let's go back two years. If one year ago doesn't sound too scary, let's go back two years and let's throw that in there. Didn't really understand why they're doing this. Okay. Um, and then it, and then it goes on to say that the more worryingly logical next step as the, as demand continues to swirl, even as the pandemic enter enters its third year. So they're, they're using the words like worryingly and the pandemic enters its third year. Um, so you keep going in here. All right. And it says it doesn't take a real estate agent to put two and two together. Okay. A rising realtor count plus frighteningly low housing supply equals trouble. Come on. Why are we, why are we painting this picture like this in men? I don't get it. Um, I'd love to come in and write some articles for in men, honestly. Um, you know, if they wanted to reach out to me and say, Ricky, you know, show us what you got. I would love to sit down and write some articles for, for in men. Um, so there's a guy, Pat, Vealing, he's the owner of real data strategies and you know, his business is analytics and he went on to point out the data here, which is that the average, uh, agent did, um, 8.4 transactions. Right. Um, you know, I guess a year ago and now it's at 7.9. So it dropped from 8.4 transactions per agent to 7.9. Okay. As the NAR membership rose, 200,000 agents. Okay. Volume fell a little bit from 3 million to 2.8. You know, transaction price went up 1.5%. So they're trying to paint this picture that even though prices went up, transactions per agent went down and income per agent went from 54,000 to only 51,000. Um, so listen, I just want you to know that if you're reading this stuff and you're seeing these articles and everything that there's nothing to be afraid of here, these numbers are going to fluctuate. And with the large influx of agents, of course the number of transactions per agent average wise is going to go down. We all know that 80, 90% of agents don't make it. So when you have 200,000 agents rushing to the market, you're going to have 80, 90% of them rush right out of the market. And what these numbers aren't showing us is between the year and a half that we had 1.4 to 1.6 million active agents. How many agents dropped out during that time? Okay. Cause it wasn't just 200 that joined. There was probably, I don't know, two, three, 400. I don't know that number that actually joined because there were another 200, 300, 400. I don't know the number who dropped out. And so those numbers would be very interesting to see the churn, the churn rate of agents. Okay. We got 1.4 to 1.6. Okay. We added 200,000 active, but how many total joined and how many quit during that time? That would be interesting to see. But guys, the point of the video today is to please don't look at these situations and think fear. Okay. Like I said from the beginning of the video, think opportunity. Where's the hole in the market? That's what I need to focus on. How can I find the people that quite possibly could be interested in doing something soon? How can I get to them, talk to them, help them through whatever the transaction may be? And in a real classic move here, the article ends with this. It's been a long two years and the pandemic doesn't seem to be going anywhere soon. Let's hope that in 2022, agents old and new figure out how to survive and thrive without resorting to out and brawls. Out and out brawls. And out and out brawls is linked to the article of the triple play, a fight that broke out between the lenders, which people got hurt in. This is literally the last sentence of the article. In 2022, let's hope agents old and new figure out how to survive and thrive without resorting to out and out brawls. I don't know if that was meant to be comical. There's nothing funny that didn't lead in with a joke. There's nothing, you know, comical about what they say here is like their seriousness can be. It has to be a joke. Maybe they have a dry sense of humor or something like that. But I just, I don't, the way this article was crafted out, man, it was a really kind of blew me away. But the reason I wanted to highlight this and talk about it was to number one, you heard all the data that I just said. So if you didn't under, didn't know that data, it's good to know. And number two, to understand my opinion on it is that these numbers are going to fluctuate. We got to keep doing what we do best, which is continuing to push forward to help more and more people buy and sell real estate. Period. End of story. Build our databases. Do everything that I teach you in the zero to diamond program that's helped thousands of agents double, triple, quadruple. We've had people five and six X their cells volume. So anyway, I hope you guys are having an incredible day. I hope you have an incredible beginning of February. I hope you're hitting the ground running and I'm doing the same. So keep crushing it out there. We love you. And we want to see you do well and stay healthy. We'll talk to you guys soon.