 What's up, everybody? Ricky Karuth here. And we have a lot to talk about when it comes to the real estate market and your ability to go out there and acquire new listings, which by the way is the name of the game in 2023. The agent with the largest inventory is going to win. And it's becoming tougher and tougher every single day that goes by to go out there and get new listings. As the Fed continues to raise their rates, as new listings hit in the market are at the lowest levels that we've seen throughout the entire pandemic, which is crazy. Home prices hit the first negative year over year number in 12 years. And so it's a very incredibly tight market. So if you're curious to what my five best opportunities are to go out there and acquire new listings as low hanging fruit, as they say, then keep watching because we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about where we feel like the real estate market is going and where the opportunities could be since this directly affects your business. And before we get into that, I want to let you know about my free zoom call. That's going to be Monday morning at 9 a.m. Eastern, 9 a.m. Eastern. And we're going to kick off week number two of the 60 day challenge. We did week one this week and we're doing week two next week. The challenge is found at zero to diamond.com and it's completely free. Tens of thousands of agents have went through the program and have found massive success. So the zoom link is going to be in the description or you can just simply go to zero to diamond.com backslash team call and I'll see you Monday morning at 9 a.m. Eastern. Now let's get into the market and where we feel like it's going. So we can identify where the best opportunities are to get listings. Let's start right here with this article that just came out today from CNBC that says home prices are back on the rise as the spring market proves more competitive than expected. My first question is, is who thought it wasn't going to be competitive? There's literally no inventory and there's a lot of demand, even though interest rates, mortgage rates are higher than they were last year. And let me just say the mortgage rates where they are, it is keeping a lot of buyers on the sideline and that's creating so much pent up demand. So I'm going to cover a little bit of this in just a second. But as we dive into this article here, you see right here, we talk about home prices in March rose for the third consecutive month on a seasonal adjusted basis. Okay, that's incredible. Prices are up three months in a row. Okay, new listings, we just talked about that are down 30% than pre-pandemic norms for this time of year. That is crazy. And nearly half, okay, half of the homes on the market are selling within two weeks. This is phenomenal data. And this is nothing that I didn't see coming, but there's so much negativity out there. It's like, what do you do? You see people that you look up to talking about the markets going to crash. I interviewed Patrick Bet David earlier this week in person. I confronted him on that because he said home prices were going to drop worse than they did in 2008, which is an incredibly massive statement seeing how 2008 was the own. During that time, there was a four-year time that prices went down on an annual basis. And that was the first time in 50, 60, 70 years that they had any kind of negative year over year appreciation. And so when you see people say these kind of things, it just scares you. Scares you have to death, right? But what we need to do is look at data, okay? Now, let's look at new listings, right? If we look at the Redfin data here, and you guys can go to Redfin and look up your specific market and look at all this data here, home sold, pending sales, median sales price, days to close, active listings, all that stuff. But we see we're way lower than we were in 2021 and 22. And when we add 2020 into the mix, we see that we're right there where we were as the market dipped with the economic shutdown that happened in March of 2020. It didn't reopen till May 1st. And you can see that we're right there during that scary time. It's crazy to think about where new listings are right now. And it makes a lot of sense. Nobody wants to sell their house because they're sitting on 3% interest rate. So this is the problem right here, okay? And when we dive deeper, when we look at, let's just look at prices, okay? This blue line is this year and look at it. It looks like it and I was not expecting it to go up like this, okay? I expected it to be level is what I was projecting, but it didn't. Now, this was totally unexpected for me is how much it's went up. You know, we started the year out at 349 and now we're at 366. We're positive on the year. We're still negative year over year 3% according to this data, but it's trying to catch up. You can see the trend there. So we'll see where this goes. But you know what I'm projecting now? I feel like prices are going to go over here and intersect the black line again and go positive year over year. And that's going to be an incredible thing to see. So be looking out for that. We'll continue to watch this data. Now let's talk about the opportunities, okay, that I'm seeing in the market right this second. I saw this article, 72 million millennials in the country and according to Zonda, 98% of these millennials want to become homeowners at some point if they aren't already. And that's because they want to build their own equity instead of someone else's, okay? So let's just think about that for just a second. If someone is renting a property, rent is going to continue to go up every year, right? At least 3%. It's not going to go up to 10%, 15% that it went up over the past couple of years, but it's going to go up at some rate, 2%, 3%, 5%, 1%, whatever it is. And over a 10-year period, that ends up being massive. So these millennials are smart. They want stability. They want a fixed payment where they know that this is going to be their payment for 30 years versus they don't know what their rent, what their monthly expenses are going to be to live, cost of living. They don't know what it's going to be year to year because they don't know what their landlord's going to go up to when their lease is up. So the millennials want this stability in their life. So of course, I looked and saw that the median age of a first-time home buyer is 33 to 36. In 2022, it was 36 years old. And this is according to the National Association of Realtors, and this is up from the 33 years of age in 2021. So we know that people that are 33 to 36 years old are the ones who are interested in buying a house, and 98% of them want to be homeowners. So then we go to birth rates. So I'll show you this right quick, just so you can have an idea of what I'm looking at and why I think about what I think about. Let's see. Let me find it here. Bam. So, yeah, you guys can see this good. And if you see right here, okay, right here, this is 1990. This is 33 years ago. You see the spike in birth rates? We're going to have a record amount of 33-year-olds this year. We have a record amount of people turning 33 years old this year. That is the beginning age of the median range of the first-time home buyers. And then guess what? Birth rates continue to stay high all the way to 2006, right? And there's even, there's even a few points where it's higher than this year. We have a long, long, we have more demand right now than we've ever seen. And we don't even know it. We don't even know it because interest rates, interest rates are holding the buyers back right now. And we don't even realize it. We're out here thinking that, oh, the market's great. It's a normal market, whatever the case may be. And we don't even realize that we're actually in a much, much stronger market than we even realize. It's insane. And so what I'm saying is the perfect storm is coming as interest rates continue to inch down. Let's take a look at interest rates. Okay. Interest rates today, the 30-year fix, the average 30-year fix is 6.43. We know the feds went up on their rates yesterday. And yesterday, mortgage rates went down nine points. Today, they're down six points. And so, you know, I get comments on my videos, you know, that, oh, you're crazy. And mortgage rates are going to be 8% later this year. And it's coming from people that actually believe that mortgage rates are tied directly to the Fed fund rates, on which they're not. They're tied to the 10-year treasury and inflation, which has very little influence from the Fed fund rates. The Fed front rate going up just basically initiated the fact that inflation was high, which made investors say, okay, well, we want more for our mortgages if we're going to put our money there into this risky asset, or at least a lot riskier than some of these other investments that they can make, they want to return on that. So they're going to get what they want. So mortgage rates are down, right? Now, that doesn't mean that mortgage rates aren't going to inch back up a little, this, that, or the other. But May 10th, a CPI report coming out next Wednesday, that's going to be the one to really keep an eye on. I'm going to watch that very closely as I do every inflation report and see exactly what that shows us, because that is supposedly supposed to be the big year-over-year turn of really incredible data in terms of inflation. So I'm excited about that to see where it goes. It's not going to make mortgage rates go down immediately, but it's going to be the beginning of some serious easing. And as we see that easing, we're going to see a tsunami of buyers come out to Woodworks. Now, the fear is this before I get into the type of leads that you want to go out and grab to get new listings. The fear is that mortgage rates come down. We see the tsunami of buyers come out, and then that in turn makes inflation go back up because we have too many buyers, not enough supply, and so prices escalate, and boom, there we go. We're off to the races again, inflation increases, which will make mortgage rates go up, and then boom, we're in this vicious cycle. I believe that that's where we are for a while until we solve the inventory problem. And that's one problem I just can't figure out because we haven't experienced the amount of demand that we have underlying right the second. And so as we move forward, when builders can't keep up and there's not enough homes, what I think is going to happen over the next 20 years is we're going to end up building the infrastructure to keep up with demand right as demand starts to dwindle because as you saw, birth rates start to dwindle down to almost nothing in 2006. And we're going to start to see less demand in 2000. What's that going to be? 2040? In 2040? 2042? 2043? And then we're going to have that oversupply. I honestly think it's going to take 20 years to work this inflation, not inflation, but this inventory, this housing inventory problem. We'll see. And there's a lot of builders building rental properties as opposed to houses for people to buy. So we're in a very interesting spot in terms of prices. I would say the name of the game is two things, right? Stack your inventory as a real estate agent and own real estate. Buy real estate. If you have to go out there and buy little properties, go buy little properties. If you can throw in with buddies to go buy some bigger properties, go buy some bigger properties. If you can throw in on some multifamily deals as multifamily will come down. Now that's the difference in residential and commercial. Residential is going to be fine. I believe that we're going to see positive year-over-year appreciation from January 1st to January 1st. I don't think we're going to have a problem there just because of the supply and demand issue. With commercial, now that's a whole different ballgame. That's cold hard numbers. And when you double the cost of debt against these large $100 million properties, that's a big, big, big problem. And I think as some of these loans become due and mature, then we're going to see some deals. We're already seeing some pretty big deals in the commercial space. So I think commercial over the next 12 months, we're going to see some really incredible opportunities that I am prepared for. And as I run into these opportunities, I would love for you to invest in these deals with me. So I'll create a landing page for you guys to fill out a form at some point in the near future so that you can get informed whenever I do run into these deals to see if you might in fact want to invest with me on some of those properties. On the flip side, I am buying single-family homes right now. I've got 200 contract as we speak, and I'm looking for more. These are in the 250 range. Great rental properties in my local market. And I think anything that's around that price range is going to do nothing but do incredible numbers over the next couple years, not to mention 5 to 10 years. So I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Moving over to where the best opportunities are for lease right this second. I believe that there are five really great opportunities right now to go out and build your business and get inventory. So what you want are people who have raised their hand and said, hey, I'll sell. And then you need the skills and the strategy to go out there and actually acquire those new listings. I think that the first one is expires. I mean, these are people who were on the market. They might still sell. They might not sell, but you've got an opportunity right there. I also like old expires, people that we're trying to sell in 2020, 1918. I called 18, 2018 expires a week ago. It's live right here on my channel, and I picked up a million-dollar client. I comped out his property. He owns the lot next door. You guys saw the call for that. If you didn't go back and watch it, it was an incredible call. But that was 2018 expires. And so go to redxdiscount.com. I'll put a link in the description for that to get a discount and get Geoled's Plus and Expires Plus. Those are going to give you the emails because I want you guys to email them as well. Call, email, send them direct mail. Right now, you've got to hit sellers with everything you've got because you need to create your own market. You need to have properties that people won't list, but we'll sell a list of them on your desk. You need to be looking for properties for your buyers. You need to hit... This is the market right here where you're going to have to work for everything that you get because it is a tight market. But we want to work smart. Expires are going to be a very good avenue. I've got scripts. You can watch me make live calls. The next one is for sell by owners. These are people that raise their hand and said, hey, I'll sell. You know, I might sell. I need to sell. I want to sell whatever the case may be at your job to get in there and see exactly what it is they're trying to do and help them do it. I have an agent that, going back to expires, I have an agent with 40 listings right now. She just put a property under contract for 3.7 million. It was 600 acres. The state of Georgia is buying it. And she got that off of an expired. All she does is call it expired. She has 40 active listings right this second. Another guy in North Carolina, he has nine pending deals and 14 more active listings. They're all for sell by owners. I'm not a for sell by owner person, but these are people who have said, hey, I'll sell and you need to get in there and see what it is they're trying to do with for sell by owners. I like to fill out the situation and see what it is they're trying to buy if they're looking to move. They have an agent that they're working with on that and help them down that road and kind of say, listen, if you guys decide to list, you have an agent, fill out the entire situation and kind of slow play it and 87% of for sell by owners end up listing their property. If you're helping them on everything else and even giving them advice on how they can sell their property on their own and they decide to give it over to an agent to let them list it, who do you think they're going to call? They're going to call you. So we have expireds, new and old. We have for sell by owners. This is low hanging fruit that you should be concentrated on. You also have absentee owners, people that own the property but don't live in the property, who can sell that property without moving from their primary residence that they're locked into a 3% interest rate. Those are the type of sellers that you want to call. Investment, Airbnb, vacation property owners, long-term rental owners. Those type of properties are prime to be listed. So you can actually go to Geo Leeds Plus and you can filter out the non-resident owners on Geo Leeds Plus and call directly the absentee owners, people that don't live in those properties and just focus on those, right? That's an incredible tool. Again, redxdiscount.com, Geo Leeds Plus, filter out the non-resident owners and get to work. You can go back 10 years worth of expireds as well. You might say, hey, I don't get a lot of expireds in my market. Well, go back 10 years worth and get expireds with drones and cancels and you'll have tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, depending on your market and get out there and get to work. What if they sold the property? It doesn't matter. You're not calling for that property. You're calling to use that property as an excuse to see if you can get to know them and see what it is they're looking to do now. You're just using that property as an excuse. Hey, I saw you were trying to sell this house a couple years ago. You know, I was just looking and just trying to figure out whatever happened with that. Let them tell you the story, right? And then when you get them talking, that means they're feeling comfortable with you and it's easy to segue that into what they're up to now if they need any help with anything, if not secure that client for the future. This is not that difficult, guys. You just have to get out there and put that sweat, equity in your business and now is the time to do it. If you're tired of paying hundreds of dollars for leads on Zillow and realtor.com and Obsidy and all these lead-generating platforms that cost you an arm and a leg, Radex cost you a couple hundred dollars a month for tens of thousands of leads. Bam! Right? And also you need to be stacking social media. You should be doing listing of videos for all of your listings, putting them everywhere. You should be working on videos all afternoon, every day, calls all morning, videos all afternoon. The third opportunity. Now fourth, we've got expires. We have for sale by owners. We have absentee owners and for rent by owners. Radex has for rent by owners. I call, I did a call session for for rent by owners a couple of weeks ago, picked up two incredible clients. You guys probably remember the lady that talked about her snake. It wasn't her snake or one of her renters snake got lost in the house. A huge boa. But those are incredible leads as well. Those are people that are trying to rent their property by owner. You're talking to the owner about this property that's more than likely vacant that they're trying to rent. They may be thinking about selling it. Maybe you're thinking about selling it in the future. They may want to buy more rental properties. These are incredible clients. Another thing with every single prospect that you talk to, regardless of how the call goes, unless it's moving towards a deal, you know, for getting off the phone to nurture them, say, listen, before I let you go, let me ask you this. If I had a great deal on a rental property, would you be interested and then listen to them and see how they respond? And if they're interested, go down that road. Great. What do you like? Single family duplexes, commercial warehouse? What do you like? Right? Right down their criteria and go find it. Your job is right now in this market is to go find your buyer's properties. Don't wait on something to come on MLS. It's going to have 10 other buyers competing on it. Your job is to go out there and find some off-market properties for your buyers right this second. So we've got expires for sell-by-owners, absentee, for rent-by-owners, low-hanging fruit guys. And when you have a buyer that you can't find the property for, handwritten letter. Do a handwritten letter. I'll say it quick and you can rewind the video if you want. But a handwritten letter, handwrite the envelope. One sentence, question. Would you consider selling your house at wherever to a prospect of mine? Question mark. Sincerely, sign your name, business card. Throw it in the mail. I got a 10% callback on that letter. My entire career has sold millions of properties, millions of dollars with the properties with that letter. So when you have a buyer, send this letter, call them and use the email and red X to email them as well. And if you want to take it a step further, go door knock them. But you need to stay busy stacking inventory, building your database right now. Because when the tsunami of buyers come through as interest rates dwindle down with inflation and no inventory on the market, but you've got a stack of inventory, you're going to be the one in control. And I'll give you one more tick before I go here. To stack inventory, you might have to take some overpriced listings. Okay? Taking overpriced listings is A-okay. Because why? We just demonstrated prices are moving up. So if you're taking overpriced listing, don't worry about it. If what you don't want to see is you not take it because it's overpriced, let another listing, another agent take the listing and then see it go under contract in two weeks. That's going to hurt pretty bad. And I see that happen all the time. I take every listing. There was a condo they were asking. It's worth 750. He wanted 1.2. I listed it for 1.2 last year. We slowly reduced it over time. We got an offer for 825 a month or two ago. He turned it down, but he's now asking 899. So we're getting offers for 825 and he's asking 899 at this point. So we're getting closer and we're going to sell that property. And it's like my dad said, get them on paper and work them from there. And with that, I'll let you guys get back to the rest of your day. I hope you had a very informed session here with me. If you like this video, click the like button, hit subscribe if you haven't already. Let me know what in the world I can do to help you. And I'll see you on the zoom call Monday at nine p nine a.m. Eastern zero diamond.com backslash team call. Let's go.