 Here we go. March pending sales numbers are officially in. The National Association of Realtors tracked these numbers and today they dropped a doozy on us. Now contrary to the title here, pending home sales tank nearly 21 percent in March. There's some incredibly positive data in this report. Now yesterday I did a video on why real estate will surge once the economy is open back up and we nearly got 300 thumbs up. Now I know we can do better than that guys so let's smash that like button so we can try to get to 300 plus a day. And to have a quick announcement, I started a second YouTube channel. My second YouTube channel is going to be more so for podcast clips and speeches. I have so much content that I just really didn't know what to do with it so I decided to just start a second YouTube channel. So it has one video on it. I'm going to link in the description below. Go there, subscribe and like the video. I'm going to be posting there every single day. I'm going to keep this channel for breaking news and live training only. So I'm out here on my back porch today. It's a rainy day today on the golf course but I'm just trying to get some work done. I did sell a condo today for around 500,000. I sold one yesterday for 325. I'm closing on one tomorrow and I'm closing on one Friday so the market is never really left as you're going to find out in the data I'm about to share with you. So in March, sign contracts to buy an existing home. People that signed contracts to buy an existing property and put that property under contract to close fell 20.8 percent compared to February and we're down 16.3 percent annually. Now I don't know about you but to me, these are incredibly positive numbers. I can't wait to see what April's numbers end up being but these are incredibly positive numbers to me. This means that out of the same amount of people that wrote contracts in February, 80 percent of that number of people still wrote contracts in March. Okay, this was the scariest moment of the pandemic and people were still writing contracts to close on properties. In my video yesterday I talked about how closings were down about 20 percent year-over-year in March for my market but we have 234 pending deals right now. We only have 122 closings as of today in April. So I'm telling you guys the market really never left. A lot of agents are sitting around you know thinking that the market is dead and I'm telling you right now here's the data for you to actually go by. I don't know what data you've been going by that tells you that there's nothing going on and that everything's dead but I'm going by this data right here and that is that there were 80 percent of the same amount of people in February writing contracts in March. That is huge. Now I'm not saying that 20 percent is nothing. Yes, 20 percent is a huge bite out of the market but it's a glass half full glass half empty situation. You still got 80 percent of a massive massive market share that is still right there for you. Another problem that the market has that's kind of holding it back from really dropping any further than what it's already is the fact that inventory is so low and in March we hit a record low. Okay, existing home market has already been suffering from a severe shortage of properties for sale. Okay, that supply hit a record low in March. Not only did potential sellers decide against listing their homes during the current economic environment but some sellers already on the market delisted their properties. Okay, so inventory was already at a really low level and now we have a lot of sellers that actually took their properties off the market because they didn't want people walking through their homes. They won't want to come contact with buyers. You know, they wanted to be safe so they took their property completely off the market. I really think this inventory problem is going to be a real factor in the market holding firm at the prices that we're at. It's just going to be really difficult for me to see a real drop in prices this year. We may see a little drop. It's definitely possible. Anything's possible at the market but how hard is it going to be to see that massive drop when inventory is already so low? On top of that, we have the average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage falling to a new low of 3.43 last week. Wow. Okay, and what's crazier than that, I closed on my new home about three weeks ago and I got 3.125 on a 30-year loan. The guy that I get my loans through Joey Parker, my lender, he told me that he has never got that low of a rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage for anybody and he's been doing this for almost two decades now. Now, something I think is very interesting that will have to play itself out is how the government is doing this mortgage forbearance program. It's allowing trouble borrowers to delay monthly payments. They're going to delay the payments and then they're going to have to pay all those payments at some point. If they had to delay them now and let's say they were living paycheck to paycheck, how are they going to pay that lump sum later? That's going to be a big question and that might add some risk to the overall market. It's going to be real interesting to see how all that plays out. But check this out. While the numbers for March or Grimm, a turnaround may have already started. Can you believe this guy's yesterday? I do a video on why real estate will surge when the economy opens up and here we are the next day. NAR comes out and they're talking about while the numbers for March or Grimm, a turnaround may have already started mortgage applications to purchase a home after falling dramatically for the last five weeks, suddenly moved higher last week, rising 12% compared to the previous week. So the people putting in mortgage applications, it fell for five weeks straight and then suddenly last week it rose 12%. I'm telling you, this surge has already begun in a small way and it's going to continue to get better and better. Now the applications were still 20% lower year over year, but even with that 12% increase in the last week was an incredible jump. Now the National Association of Realtors comes out to say that they believe that there will be some pent-up demand and we will see a surge in transactions at some point in the year, but they still believe that 2020 will be about 14% lower than 2019. But here's the kicker. In fact, due to the ongoing housing shortage, home prices are likely to squeeze out again in 2020 to a new record high. Okay, so they're thinking their projection is, is that we're going to be 14% lower in terms of transactions, but prices should end up, they're saying they're predicting about 1.3% higher for the year. Of course, that's going to be the average, every market is going to be different. You might see a little lower in some markets, a little higher in others, but overall they're saying that we're going to see a slight increase, 1%. That's not a whole lot. It's basically flat, but hey, it's not down 10%. It's not down 20%. And here again, guys, that could happen. Who knows? Nobody knows. The, all these predictions really mean nothing at the end of the day, but what an incredibly positive report. And I really hope that you guys watched my video yesterday, which I'll link below, if you didn't see it, and you go to your MLS, you do what I said in that video, you go to your MLS and you pull up all the data, you pull up the pending deals, you put all, pull up last year's closings per month, you pull up this year's closings per month. And I want you to realize there's new listings, pending deals and closings happening every single day in your market. There is absolutely zero reason to slow down right now. Just because we're not at the office, we have to work out of our houses. That means we just take off. It just doesn't make sense to me. We should be at our homes making calls, seeing what we can do to help people buy and sell real estate. That is our job. Thanks for watching this video. I'm going to keep you informed every step of the way, the market moving forward. Go subscribe to my second channel. I'm going to put out content every day on that channel. I'm going to put less content on this channel, higher quality, and more content on the other channel. So I'll see you guys on the next video. Let's go.