 what you need to be doing. Here's what you need to be telling your clients right now that are looking at this and thinking, I can't pay 8%, 7.5%, mortgage rates, I'm just gonna hold off. No, no, no, no, no. No. Right now, you've got a moment of opportunity for listings and buyers to grab a deal. Sellers are dropping their prices more than any time on record as long as they've been recording this, okay? You got prices that are softening. Therefore, you've got sellers that are a little more motivated than they were. Things are sitting on the market a little longer. So with your buyers, I don't wanna pay 8%. No, take this moment when sellers are dropping their price and want to sell and go ask for a... The data is in, ladies and gentlemen, 89% of buyers recently purchased their home through a real estate agent, okay? 6% purchased directly through the previous owner. You got 89% of buyers purchasing their home through a real estate agent. 90% of buyers would use their agent again or recommend their agent to others. So in the wake of these lawsuits, it's kinda like we have the tell of two worlds here when it comes to consumers because we've all seen, as real estate agents, watching my channel, we've all seen comments of the general public and it seems like agents become public enemy number one. Everybody thinks we make way too much money and don't provide near enough value or in some cases any value at all. I find this disturbing, honestly. I found another statistic here which I found very interesting for sell-by-owners, typically sell for less than the selling price of other homes, okay? This is real data, by the way. This is data composed and put together with 7,000 people over the last, that have bought or sold over the last year, okay? For sell-by-owner homes, people who did not have a real estate agent sold at a median price of 310,000 last year. This is last year, significantly lower than the median of an agent-assisted home at $405,000. So you see, ladies and gentlemen, and this is just data here, okay? You sell without an agent, by rule, are you an exception of the rule? Could you go out there and sell it on your own and make the same amount of money as you could with an agent? Sure, absolutely. You can also go roof your own house, do your own plumbing, do your own electrical work, sure, you know, have at it. As a real estate agent, and the real estate agent community itself, we're not out here saying, oh, please use us, Mr. Buyers and Mr. Sellers. That's not what we're saying at all. We're saying, if you need help, we are here to help you through the process. We are professionals. And by the way, we can get a lot more money for your house than you could if you sold it by owner. That's just data. So that's what I find extremely interesting here when we start digging into the data that buyers, 90% of them would use their agent again or would recommend their agent. Sellers are getting way less when they go by owner because they're not a professional. They don't understand how to get the highest price and they don't understand how to work through the entire process. Again, if you can do it on your own, if you're savvy, if you understand the process, great, go do it. We're not talking to you. Talking to the 90% of people who choose to use a real estate agent by choice because they don't know how to do it. They can't handle the situation. Same reason I wouldn't try to do my own electrical work. I'm gonna hire an electrician to do that. Why? Because I don't wanna get electrocuted. The same reason why if I'm a for sale by owner with no experience, I don't want to lose $100,000. That's the difference in the median price of a for sale by owner versus selling it through an agent. Since I started the 30 listing challenge, about a month and a half ago, maybe we're getting maybe close to 60 days. The list of agents who have gotten a lot of listings is a very large list. I'll name a few. Shane Noblin, he got 13 listings so far. He's in North Carolina. Nadine Blakely, she's in Virginia. She picked up 12 listings so far. Eric Dunnigan, he picked up nine listings in Sarasota. So far, Chris Griswold. He's picked up seven listings in Philly. So far, Rachel Warrell just listed this amazing home. She's down in Panama City. Agents are picking up listings left and right regardless of the lawsuits that are happening. It's like, who cares about the lawsuits? Go out and do your job. I'll say one thing about the lawsuits. And then I wanna dive into market data for you to understand the magnitude of the opportunity right this second, right now, in November. Now, this applies to December, January. It applies to all throughout the year. You have to understand how to work the cycles of the year in real estate to really maximize your results. And that's what I wanna really drive home to you. But the one thing I wanna say about the lawsuit is, I want you to treat this like I did everything in my career. I ignored it. 2008 happened, I ignored it. Start market crashed, I ignored it. I could go down the line of things that I just completely blocked out and super hyper focused on what I'm trying to do that's right in front of me. Now, there's the argument, well, this could change the industry, Ricky. Why aren't you worried about that? Shouldn't we be preparing? Shouldn't we be thinking about that? All I can say is, no, no, no, no, no, no. What you need to be focusing on is how many relationships, and I'm gonna go through this data of how people actually choose a real estate agent. This is real data. What you need to be focused on is how many people in your market know who you are. If things change in terms of how we get paid, how much we get paid, all of that is irrelevant. If you don't have a massive database of people who know who you are, none of that's gonna matter. If you have to adjust the way you play the game, let's say you're closing five, 10 deals a month, okay? If you're not closing five to 10 deals a month, that's what you need to be focused on getting to. Is that gonna happen overnight? No, but can you get there over the next three to five years? Yes, you can. If you really grind it out, are you willing to grind it out? That's my question to you. But if we're out here and we're closing five to 10 deals a month, okay? And the rules of the game change, you just make adjustments, okay? Well, okay, you can make less per deal, okay? Tell me what the rules of the game are and let me line up, line up the way that I'm gonna play the game and go out here and crush everybody. If the game changes that much, guess what, a lot of agents are leaving the business, leaves way more market share for this guy. And that's the way you need to be thinking. I'm gonna take over now, before, during, and after. There's any changes made whatsoever. And you know what? 95% of the stuff you worry about never happened and the 5% that does, you can deal with it when it happens. So therefore, worry about 100% of nothing. What I think is gonna happen is this is gonna get appealed all the way to the Supreme Court and get thrown out. That's what I think. But just like I talk about how the real estate market home prices aren't gonna crash, okay? Talk about it, been talking about it for years now, aren't gonna crash. And here we are, we're still hitting all-time highs. We're positive year over year right now when everybody else is saying this thing's gonna crash and burn. And, you know, people are saying at the time. Of course, you know, prices going up and everything like that. The real root of it is the fact that I don't care if it does crash. Same thing here. Do I think, I'm just telling you what I think is gonna happen. Do I think it's gonna get appealed and get thrown out? Yep. Do I think that it could get appealed and go through and make massive changes to our industry? Yep. Do I carry their way? No. And frankly, I'm not even gonna think about it. I'm gonna focus on my day to day. So let's dive into these market statistics. And also, I'm going to do a training. Okay, I'm gonna do a training on lead generation, scripting the whole nine yards later this week, either Thursday or Friday. I'm waiting on a news channel to let me know if I'm actually gonna go on air with them later on this week. But if you wanna be notified about that, text me, right? Join my text community. Text me at 251-312-8844 right now. And just add yourself to my contact so you can get notified on everything that I have going on moving forward. 251-312-8844. Let's dive in here. So first off, we've got median home prices here in Dallas, Fort Worth falls to $398,000. Okay, first time under $400,000 since March. So what did I tell you guys? I've been telling you for months now that the fall and the winter is gonna be the very best time to buy. And this is what you need to be talking to your clients about, why? Because every fall, every winter prices soften. This even happened in 2021. Okay, look here. These are median home prices, okay? Median sales prices, right? This is 2021, this orange. You see it peaked out there at about June, July at 342-343. And then down here in October, it was 337. So it went, even in this, this is the boom, okay? So it didn't go down that much, but it did soften. Even in that year of the massive boom, it still went down from 343 to 337. Now a lot of people don't even realize that. They just think, oh, that was the year when the prices didn't go down. Yes, they did. Now this is national numbers. Yes, every market's local. Okay, and what I'm gonna talk about in this video with the market data, sure, it may, it may absolutely not be true in your market. I'm gonna talk about, you know, prices softening and, you know, listings going up and stuff like that. They may not be true in your market, okay? I know Hawaii is, you know, low inventory prices still very high. There's many markets where inventory's not growing. Prices are still climbing. Yes, yes, yes, yes. You're absolutely right, okay? But I'm talking national here. I'm talking about the mentality. Even if you're in one of these markets where prices are still climbing, get out there and what are you gonna do? Except for expand your footprint and people that know who you are in the market so that you can take as much market share as possible. That's what I said. It doesn't matter the time of year that you watch this video or that you apply this. It's always gonna be the same. But right now you can maximize even more than you can when it's busier, okay? That's what I want you to realize. But even in 2021, prices went down. Now we're seeing it the same thing this year. Prices is soft and we got a little kick up right there. But overall, we've softened new listings right here, okay? You see, we've caught up with last year. We have caught up with last year. When normally that doesn't happen right now. You can see the decrease right there, year over year. It was like down 18% last year. This year we have caught up. We're actually higher than we were, 0.3%. So I'm seeing stories like this in certain markets where home prices are, you know, softening. Maybe they haven't went, you know, maybe they're, maybe they're just going sideways in your market. Whatever the case may be, okay? Whatever the case may be. Now we've got this housing market update from Redfin. Record share of home sellers drop prices as high rates cut into buyer budget. This is a record, guys. Nearly 7% of homes posted a price drop during the four weeks ending October 29th on average. The highest portion on record, okay? The record comes as mortgage rates hover around elevator levels, hitting their highest in 23 years last week, cutting deep into buyer budgets, okay? So we could go into some of these statistics down here. All this stuff is very interesting, by the way. We can get down to the, and look, mortgage payments, okay? Mortgage payments at the 7.7%, 2700, it's up 12%. Now what did I say last year? Buy, buy, now if you buy now, you're looking at a 12% higher mortgage payment. Everybody was laughing at me for saying you better buy now. Okay, well prices are higher and so are interest rates. Exactly what I thought was gonna happen, okay? Meeting sales price is up 3.4% year over year. So we're on track to hit a nice positive year this year in terms of appreciation. Meeting asking price is 5.4% year over year. You can see it has the same little trajectory as last year. Home payments, you know, house payments up 12.3%. Man, I'm sure some of you wish you would have bought last year. This isn't going to get better, okay? Anytime soon, anytime soon. And what you need to be doing, here's what you need to be telling your clients right now that are looking at this and thinking, I can't pay 8%, 7.5%, mortgage rates, I'm just gonna hold off. No, no, no, no, no. No, right now, you've got a moment of opportunity for listings and buyers to grab a deal. Sellers are dropping their prices more than anytime on record as long as they've been recording this, okay? You've got prices that are softening. Therefore, you've got sellers that are a little more motivated than they were. Things are sitting on the market a little longer. So with your buyers, I don't wanna pay 8%. No, take this moment when sellers are dropping their price and want to sell and go ask for a mortgage rate buy-down, a permanent buy-down. Don't do a temporary buy-down. Get a permanent buy-down that lasts the whole 30 years, okay? New construction, new construction. They're giving you buy-downs. You don't even have to ask for it. They're just like, here, here's a buy-down. Get it into the 5% range. There's even a builder, I believe it's in Ohio that's doing under 5%. They're getting like 4.7% on a primary home. So you can get mortgage rates in the 5% range, whether it's existing through a buy-down, ask the seller to pay for it or pay for it yourself. Split it with them, whatever you gotta do. Get it down into the 5% range. Same thing with new construction. They're giving it to you, okay? We did, I did five new construction homes, investor 5.9%. Of course, this is when interest rates were around seven, okay, as opposed to where they are now. By the way, they were 8% two weeks ago, now they're 7.5% ever since the Fed came out with their, we're gonna hold off on raising rates this month. That doesn't mean they're not gonna raise them next month or whenever, but at least we've got some kind of pause right now to kind of sit back and see what's the economy gonna do? See PI numbers, unemployment, et cetera. But don't walk into these situations with the buyers and act like 8% is the only way. No, you can get a sub 5% mortgage rate right now and that's what you need to be preaching to them. Let me go get you a 5.5, a 5.8, a 5.4, whatever, percent mortgage rate. Go to your lender right now and say, okay, if we buy down, what's the rate's gonna be? Give me your products right now with the current situation. So I could go out here and sell some properties. Don't sit around saying, oh, nothing's happening. So let me just ride this out. No, you need to be closing deals now right this second. Pending sales negative 9% year over year to be expected, new listing homes up 1%, right? New listings have caught up. So that means listings are hitting the market more than they were last year. We had it down your last year, of course, but we're picking up steam guys. So take advantage of this, okay? Get out there and stack your listings. Prices are softening. Things are sitting on the market a little longer. More people are listing their properties. A lot of this has to do with the fact that we as a population are getting used to the fact that rates are gonna be here for a while. So some of these sellers are saying, you know what? I'm tired of waiting. I need to go ahead and get out here and do something. 3.7 months of inventory on the market. Now normally four to five months as a buyer is considered a balanced market, getting closer to a buyer's market, okay? So that's up a little bit from last year. Let's keep raising it. Let's keep, let's get some inventory guys. I'm asking you, I'm asking you as a real estate agent to get out here and help us build inventory in the market so we can get to a more balanced market, which I believe we're getting closer and closer. 38% of pending deals went under contract within two weeks. All right, home sold in a meeting of 33 days. So we're lower here than 2020. We're lower than 2021. So we're lower. Let's say no, no, no, let's say we're lower than 2022. We're still not lower than 2021, the year of the boom. 29% of home sold above final list price, all right? That's lower than 21 or 22. All right, and that's good. That's good. That means there's less competition out there. God, that's what I'm trying to tell you. There's less competition right now. This is a moment you can stack listings. This is a moment that your buyers can negotiate with sellers because after the first of the year the market normally picks back up. So what do you think's gonna happen? More competition, you're gonna have, inventory is gonna come right now is the moment. Get a buy down, let's go. 6.9% of listings have price drops. And you see right there, that is the highest that's ever been recorded, okay? On average, home sold for 99% of final list price. Let's get it, that's under 100, which has been a second. Redfin home buyer index minus 1% year every year. Not a real big change there. Let's dig into some of these statistics. 7% of recent for sell by owners, or a 7% of homes sold by owner, okay? This is an all-time low. This is an all-time low. All-time low, all-time low for sell by owners, people selling by owner, all-time low, okay? Well, aren't we public enemy number one? Why is for sell by owner? I mean, these people have choices to do this. Well, yeah, because people can and you guys are fixing prices. You know what bothers me about that? Is when I dig into this statistic right here, 71% of buyers interviewed only one agent during their home search. Now, that's okay. Well, buyers aren't coming out of pocket right now. Okay, let's see. Let's see if we have that for, okay, right here. 81% of recent sellers contacted only one agent before finding the right agent they worked with to sell their home. 81% of recent sellers contacted only one agent. So that tells me that you're not out here trying to get a second opinion. You know, you wanna say we're price fixing, but you're not even asking a second agent and creating competition in the market. Whose fault is that, by the way? Yeah, it's insane. It's insane. It's like, you guys are price fixing. You know, well, did you talk to a second agent and see if anybody else would be cheaper? No, I didn't. I only talked to one agent and they were stuck on their commission. And, you know, I went with it because I felt like I had to. Man, does somebody have to tell you that you have the option to get a second opinion on who your agent is and see if somebody else would do it for cheaper because there's plenty of agents that go lower. All you gotta do is look at, if you looked at listing agreements across the country, you will find for the people who think that we price fix, there's different commissions, I guarantee you, on 95% of listing agreements out there. The whole, this whole thing's insane because the lawyers, the plaintiffs are arguing that it's price fixing, but yet they're paying a lawyer a price that wasn't negotiated. It's like they're in there, you know, operating in the same, you know, manner as what they're arguing. It's insane, man. The whole thing's absurd. The only reason that agents' loss is because, I believe just because the attorneys were better on the other side, which goes back to, you know, hire the right person. Yeah, hire someone who is worth, yeah, it's the same thing with real estate agents. Now, let's dive back in here to some of this. Okay, the majority for sell-buy owners, sellers, 57% knew the buyer. So it's like they knew the buyer before they bought, okay? Before they sold. So it's not like they advertised it, maybe they advertised a little bit, but they knew the buyer. So it wasn't like, you know, some of these maybe weren't even advertised. They just told somebody they knew and sold it. Let's see, and I thought this, I'm gonna repeat this. This was so interesting that for sell-buy owners, typically sell less. It's about 100,000. It's 95,000 cheaper on a median home price. If for sell-buy owners get about 95,000 less, this was last year, okay? This was last year. Okay, first time home buyers made up 32% of the, you know, home buys this year. Okay, that's up from 26%. So it's up, but it's still below the average of 38% that's seen since 1981. So we're still down first time home buyers, but we still have about a third of purchases being made by home, by first time home buyers. The typical age of that first time home buyers 35 years old, slightly down from 36 years old last year. The typical repeat buyer, not first time home buyers fell to 58 years old. That was at 59 years old the year before. 26%, the primary reason for purchasing a home was the desire to own a home or their own. For first time home buyers though, that jumps to 60%. So 60% of first time home buyers, they bought because they had the desire to own their own home. Now, how do people choose a real estate agent? Okay, that's where we find this information. And this is buyers, 89% purchased through a real estate agent, 6% purchased directly through the owner. Having an agent help them find the right home. 43% of buyers used an agent that was referred to them. So the biggest percentage is referrals, 43%. Preferred them by a friend, neighbor or relative. 13% used an agent they'd worked with in the past to buy or sell a home. 7% found their agent when acquiring about a specific property online. And 7 found their agent through a website without a specific reference. So 43%, then you have 13%, 7 and 7, okay? 7 and 7 is online, okay? So let's just combine those two, 14%. Okay, so 43% used an agent that was referred to them by a friend or family or coworker relative. 13% was a repeat customer to an agent. And 14% found their agent online, either, you know, inquiring about a specific property or just went through a website of some sort. Okay, so think about that. Relationships over transactions. When you're a relationship builder in the market and you just are great at creating relationships, by the way, I'm gonna link my 30 listing challenge below in the description. Go out there and get 30 listings right now. The video will make you believe that you can do it if you don't think you can do it right this second. And text me 2513128844 to get notified about our training coming up this week and future trainings. But this is it. This is why I went all in on relationships, I knew. Okay, 71% buyers only interviewed one agent, 90% of buyers, I said this earlier. Would use their agent again or recommend their agent to others? Let's get it. Now, this is home sellers. 65% of sellers found their agent through a referral from a friend. Okay, 65% was referred. Okay, that's larger than the 43% that were buyers that were referred to another agent. Again, 81% of recent sellers contacted only one agent before finding the right agent they worked with to sell their home. That is staggering to me and part of the problem. People wanna blame agents for the problem here with this supposed price fixing where it's not. A lot of people argue just because they know agents that won't go below a certain number. Well, I know roofers that won't go below a certain number. I know attorneys that won't go below a certain number. I know every single industry out there that won't go below a certain number and that's because they go broke if they go any there. You won't be in business anymore. But when 81% and 81% of sellers, 71% of buyers only contacted one agent without getting a second opinion on one of the largest financial decisions and moves that they're gonna make in this decade, whoo, get you a second opinion, guys. 46% of sellers use the same agent to purchase a home as to sell their home. This share rises to 84% who purchased within 10 miles. 75% of sellers reported that they provided the agent's compensation. The typical sellers recommended their agent once since selling their home. 20% of sellers recommended their agent four or more times since selling their home. I mean, most sellers recommend their agent once, at least once, and 20% have recommended them four or more times, but we're public enemy number one and the seller wasn't happy with our services. Let's go sue everybody. 87% said they would definitely or probably recommend their agent for future services. 87%, it's wild, guys, this world that we're living in. What I want you to get out of this video is this, that the market has slowed down a tick, okay? We're getting more new listings, prices are softening again, maybe not in your direct market, but this is happening nationwide. If you're one of the markets where this is not happening, the same rules apply to you. Get out there and expand your market share. Go to the 30 listing challenge in the link below and let me know what you think in the comments and let's get it this week. 35 with the top down, quick to tell a hater they should get like me.