 Hey, what's up everybody, Ricky Carruth here. Thank you so much for being here. I'm super honored to be here and share with you today. I feel like today is going to be super important information just for me to you, trying to implant the knowledge in here and try to give that to you for that experience. I kind of want to start out with how long I've been in the business 21 years now. And so I went through the last, let's just call it 10 year cycle. You know, the 2008 was just a massive crash. It was like a, you know, once in 100 years type deal. Honestly, if you look back through all the other recessionary periods and how the housing market responded, 2008 was definitely an outlier. I mean, even back in the 70s, when interest rates went up to 18, 19 percent, home prices didn't go down. And honestly, while I'm on that subject, I really came to the point where it's a realization that this market shift, this 10 year cycle that we're experiencing right now is far more comparable to the 70s, to the late 70s, early 80s, than 2008. A lot of people try to compare what's happening now to 2008. And it's really no comparison. It's literally apples to oranges. Whereas in the late 70s, when mortgage rates went up to 18 percent, it's very similar how the housing market has responded. And I'll tell you how. Number one, interest rates, mortgage rates went up because inflation was really high. You know, when inflation hit 9 percent last year, and, you know, they started to raise rates because of that, they would tell you, and you heard this over and over again, you know, this is the highest inflation we've had in 40 years. Well, the comparing it to the late 70s, when inflation went up to 9, 10 percent, and they did the same thing. They raised interest rates, the mortgage rates went up more than doubled, you know, pretty quickly. And the housing market responded very similar. You know, there were people that were sitting on 8, 7, 8, 9 percent, you know, 5 percent mortgage rates on their current mortgage when rates now are 16, 17, 18. And they're saying, we're not selling. Why would we sell and move into a higher mortgage rate? Same thing that's happening now. Sellers are saying, I'm not going to sell because I don't want twice the mortgage rate I have now. Even though I want to, I'm not going to. So inventory was low. Price has held solid, even continued to go up. It's just very eerily similar to what we're experiencing right now. So every shift kind of has its own personality, if you will. But the point of the matter is, is that when you've been through the market cycles, you kind of understand what to expect. I got caught with my pants down in 2008, lost everything, went bankrupt, sleep on on friends' couches and had to kind of regroup and get back in the business. But then after that happened, crashes didn't bother me anymore. I realized that this is a market cycle and the closing's happening every day. I'm going to go through all that. But for you guys that this is your first major market shift, it's probably scary. You're probably thinking, oh my God, what, you know, what is this? You know, what do I do? Am I going to make it? And there's all these fears and self-doubted things of that nature and insecurities and lack of confidence and stuff. And that's okay. It's totally normal. When you go through this, you're going to realize that wasn't anything. You know, bring on the next tenure cycle. And let's continue to build. But what's very interesting is that these tenure cycles can fluctuate your business, say 20% to the downside. Never take it to zero unless you let it, unless you slow down with the market. But on the flip side, when the market resurges, you can literally double, triple, quadruple your business. Okay. If you set yourself up during the shift, and that's what I want to talk about today, is setting ourselves up right now while things are slower than it was last year and the year before, but also this time of year between now and the end of the year is when you're going to plant the seeds to make more money in 2024 than you made in 2022. Let's not even compare 2023, right? Let's compare 2022. Most of you are having down years compared to last year. If you're doing better, good for you. But the point of the matter right now, especially if you're newer is to keep your head above water. Keep your head above water, expand your database, and your business will explode when the market resurges, which it will. So I'm going to go through a lot of stuff today. You know, so get ready to take some notes and let's dive right in here. I talked about the difference in the crash now and the crash in the 70s and how closely correlated those are. But however, how are we correlated to 2008, right? So when 2008 hit, you know, and I regrouped and I understood how this whole game worked and then I took what happened in 2008 and used it to multiply my business to where my business tripled and quadrupled during the resurgence. And that's how I got to 100 deals a year as a single agent. You can do the same thing right now. This is your 2008. So this is an illustration of transactions right now. The first red arrow is 2008. I know it's kind of small on the screen here, but just kind of visualize this. The first arrow is 2008, number of transactions in the country. That was our lowest year during that entire, you know, crash back then. The Great Recession. And look at where we are now, the last red arrow. We're literally lined up exactly to 2008. This is 2008 right now. And you can literally set yourself up for the rest of your career based on what you do right now. But if you sit back and you say, you know, nobody's doing anything. So what's, what, why even try, you know, there's no need to make a cause or post it on social or, or trying to build business right now. Because just nobody's doing anything that is wrong. And you're, you're, you're basically throwing away your career. You're, you, you could triple, quadruple, five, 10 acts your business. You know, in 2025 and 26, based on what you do over the next 12 months, unless you have the mentality that nobody's doing anything. So let's just not do it, not try. And what, what that tells me is that you're in a short-term mindset. You're not trying to build a career. You're just trying to build a 2023. And nobody cares about 2023. You're not going to look back in 2025 and six, let's say 2026. Are you going to look back at what you made in 2023 and really care? Are you going to be more interested in what you're making in 2026? What are you going to care most about? What you made in 2023 or what you're making in 2026? I'll let you decide. But what you're going to make in 2026 is going to be predicated on what you do right now. And this is the opportunity. So what did I learn back then? Right? The first thing I learned was that closings happen every day no matter what. I didn't know that. I wish somebody would have told me that. So when you realize this revelation, you start, the pressure starts to be released and worrying about what the market's doing because they will happen every single day by the truckloads regardless of market conditions. If you look back at 2008, 9-11, dot-com crash, all the different scary economic times, closings continue to happen every single day. No matter what, did they fluctuate? Were there more some years and less other years? Yes. But did they ever go to zero? No. I'll go back to the last slide. This was the worst time, the first arrow, the worst time. And there were still 4 million transactions. More than 4 million transactions. And that was as bad as it gets. Could it go down a little bit under 4 million? Yeah, I think that's a possibility in a really, really bad year. But the fact is that that is basically the bottom of the barrel. Right now, just like 2008, we are down to only the people who have to buy, who have to sell. And that's what you need to get through your head right now, is that very few people have to buy, have to sell. But those are your today clients that you're going to make money on. You're trying to make every single prospect somebody who closes a deal today. They're telling you they are thinking about it. They're telling you that they might if they could. They're saying, well, we don't have anywhere to go if we did sell. We'd like to, but there's nowhere to go. Interest rates are too high. Whatever their excuse is, they're basically telling you they don't want to do anything right now. Quit trying to get them to do something right now and save them for later. See, those people that don't want to do anything today, they're the exact clients that will triple and quadruple your business in two years when the market resurges, right? But you got to save them for a rainy day. What do you, how do you do that? You put them in your database to get a weekly email on the same day of the week forever. All right. I only got 30 minutes here. I can't cover everything, but I'm going to try. But the only, the only two type of people that are buying or selling right now are people that A, have to buy herself for whatever reason, or B, are investors. Investors buy no matter what. They sell no matter what. These are the two you need to be concentrated on to make money now. Pay your bills now. Do deals now. The other 95% of people you talk to that might do something, they're really not. Save them for a rainy day, a.k.a. weekly email. Got it? The second thing I learned is that business is unlimited. You can't do every deal out there. Nobody can. That's why there's millions of agents and they're still all in business because there's plenty for everyone. Okay. You can't do every single deal no matter what the market's doing. There's enough business that you're willing to go out there and work for, right? And always put relationships over transactions. See, I didn't know any of this stuff. I thought my business was correlated to the markets ups and downs. I thought that business was, you know, there was only so much to go around. You know, I thought that I should just be trying to close, close, close because who cared about creating a relationship? I'm going to make some money. And then, you know, I wasn't thinking past the deal. That's wrong. That's not how you build a career. That's how you go out of business. So if you understand these principles, you can make it through anything. Now, the first thing we have to do is visualize. The way that I've visualized how this was going to play out for me back in 2008 and I'll apply it to today's market for you. In 2008, I got back in and I realized, oh, all these foreclosure agents are making all this money. I want to be one of those guys. And then I learned really quickly trying to become a foreclosure agent, to work on the bank that that wasn't what I wanted to do. You're basically like an over glorified hourly worker. They're making you run all over the place and you're basically their slave. I didn't want to be anybody's slave. I want to build my own business. So I said, okay, I'll do it a different way. Let me go represent the buyers. And this is where I started visualizing because I knew where the market was going to go. The market was down. It had nowhere to go but up. Let me go help the people buy these foreclosures at half off. And in three years, when the market's better, there's no foreclosures and prices go up. They'll sell that property. I sold them upgrade to a better one and refer me five friends. Well, there's eight deals right there. So I knew that spending time trying to help these people buy these great deals on foreclosures would bloom into and spider web and snowball into hundreds of deals. And that's what happened. I got to where I was selling 100 properties a year because I visualized this and then committed to it and executed over the course of years. Same thing right now. We know that interest rates are eventually going to come down. It's not rocket science. May they stay longer, higher, longer than we think? Sure. Could they go up a little higher? Sure. Could they come down and then back up a little bit? Could inflation have a second wave and we see a resurgence of interest? Sure. All that stuff can happen. But we know long term they're going to settle out. They're going to come back down and the market's going to explode. Inventory is still extremely low. And the way that I see it playing out is that the trade up seller is going to sell their house and then take another one off the market, net even for active listings, but positive for new listings, transactions spike. And then first time home buyers come through, which there's tons of them. I'll show you in a sec. They're going to come through and take a property off the market. So now we have a net negative for active listings. So I see new listings shooting up, transactions shooting up, active listing shooting down. And this is going to be to your benefit for your business if you're in position before this wave hits. But if you sit around and say, oh, nobody's doing anything, no need to go out there and create relationships with people on my market so that my business can blow up in two years, then your business isn't going to blow up in two years when this happens. It's really that simple. So we have to visualize this and start to execute and come in and go all in and understand how this is going to play out if we do certain things on a daily basis. Okay. Where are we? 2008 level of transactions. Home prices are holding up due to no inventory. And we have historic pent-up demand. The demand is coming from two places. One, people who want to sell but can't because of interest rates, the trade-up sellers who want to upgrade or they want to relocate or whatever, but they're just not in position to, they don't want to double their mortgage rate. But they want to really bad. And that number one, that desire to do so is growing every day. And then other sellers are joining that group of sellers. It's continuing to grow every day and their desire to do so is growing every day, but they can't with where mortgage rates are. But that will change. And when it changes, who are they going to come to to do those two deals? You, if you've created a relationship with them now, what you do between now and the end of the year is going to dictate everything in your business for the next two to three years. The second place is there's more 33-year-olds than we've seen in the last 20 years. You can see right here, the last time we had birth rates this high, 33 years ago, was the Baby Boomers, which was 20 years before now. And you can see that the birth rates there stay elevated for a good 16 years, which means we have decades because, remember, this is 33-year-olds, so then they're going to be 34, 35, 36, so on and so forth. We have decades, decades of people coming into the market who want to own homes. There's a lot of surveys out there with millennials. And, you know, I mean, there was one in particular that showed a certain number of millennials and Gen Zs, like didn't want to own a home for whatever reasons. They thought it was too expensive. They, you know, they, they, well, whatever their reasons are, there was a survey that showed all this. And it was the typical headline, negative headline type thing. And when I looked at the data, it basically, the biggest piece of the data I saw was that it was only like 10 to 20% of these people that were surveyed. It was like 6,000 people that were surveyed. There was only like 10 to 20%, depending on which age, you know, which generation they were wanted, didn't want to own a home, which told me, because I always look at the glass half full, that you got a good 80 to 90% of these people who actually did want to own a home, that do want to own a home. It's insane. So you're always going to have this group that just wants to go rent, whatever. And that's fine. That's great for me. I'm an investor. I own a lot of rental properties. But I believe that you're always going to have an overwhelmingly amount of people who want to own homes. Maybe, you know, who knows what's going to happen in the future. The fact is that we've got, based on this survey, 89% of people that want to become homeowners. They're younger people. So when we see these birth rates, we realize, there's decades and decades and decades of first time home buyers. What are those first time home buyers turn into? They turn into trade up sellers who sell that first home they bought and upgrade to a nicer one, right? It leaves that first home they bought to another first time home buyer or another trade up seller who had a smaller house. And then the cycle just continues and transactions continue to churn. My point is, is that you are in an incredible business to be in. And you've got job security for a long, long time. Do your job, help people buy and sell real estate. It's really that simple. We got into this business and it's really predicated on one thing. Helping people buy and sell real estate. And mostly helping people you don't know buy and sell real estate because you run through the people you know pretty quickly. Now it's down to, okay, let's blow this thing up. I got to talk to people I don't know and help them buy and sell real estate. So the opportunity right now that I see, okay, we've got the people who have to buy and sell. We've got to be careful here with, we need to start getting better at categorizing our prospects. Is this a, I want to, if I could prospect? Or is this a, I have to buy or sell something right now. That's, we need to, we need to really pay attention to this because the people who don't need to, they would if they could. Those aren't your clients today. And the problem is you're trying to turn every prospect into a client today, you know, Ricky, you know, this person, this seller said they would move, but interest rates are too high. What do I do? What do I say? Say great. Awesome. You got an agent you're going to work with when interest rates come down. I'd love to work with you when that day comes. Is it okay if I say in touch with you? Cool. What's a good email? Let's stay in touch there. If you need something, you give me a shout. Boom. Move on. So the next prospect, this next prospect needs to do something right now. Their lease is coming up in 60 days. They're pre-approved for 450. They've decided they're going to buy something. Period. End of story. Their mind is set. The next prospect, their mother died. I actually just ran into that today. Their mother died and they're going to sell it. They're not going to keep this property, right? Have to sell, right? Those are your clients today. That's your money today. Quit spending your wills and spending so much time on the people who want to or what if they could right now in this market. Follow up with them. Help them stay in touch. You know, go down that road. They may buy something. I'm not saying they won't. I'm just saying be careful. Don't spend all your time. Continue trying to build a volume of a huge pipeline. Another couple tidbits. I've been thinking about this a lot lately and that is the circle prospecting, calling random property owners, versus expired for sale by owners, for rent by owners, so on and so forth. So, you know, 90% of mortgages right now are under 6%. Okay? Not going to sell. Like, let's see, that's 90. There's like 65% or under 4%. You know, what is like 30 something or under 3%. They're not going to sell. Now, there's also 45% of homes in the U.S. that are owned free and clear. No mortgages, right? Which is incredible for the market. So, I'm not saying there's no opportunities in circle prospecting because there is. I built my entire business. I did nothing else. I tried a lot of things, but this was my bread and butter and I built it up, 100 deals a year, making a million bucks. Whoop-de-doo-dah. My point is, is that in this market, we need to be a little bit more efficient with our leads, our lead generation activities. And in my opinion, the for sale by owners, hey, I'll sell. The expires, hey, I'll sell. The for rent by owners, investors, remember people that need to buy, need to sell and investors, right? For rent by owners, expires, for sell by. And I've never been a big for sell by owner person. I'm not a big fan of that because, you know, they take a little more, you know, you got to really get in there. They're kind of, they take a little more work to kind of get them going. Some people are masterful at the for sell by owners. Not me so much, but I love expires. And for rent by owners. But think about that though. If you're one of these that's just circle prospecting all the way, you know, kind of understand that might not be the most efficient right now. Mix it up. Do circle prospecting one day, expire one day, for sell by owner, for rent by owner. But you guys should all be also be doing social media all afternoon, all right? Calls all morning, social media all afternoon. Absolutely crush every aspect of that. And you'll have a massive business. Here we go. Opportunities I see. People that have to buy or sell, right? Start categorizing and using your time efficiently. Investors, investors buying, selling no matter what the market's doing. So at the end of every call, every single call, no matter if it's good or bad, and sometimes this will bring a bad call, back to life. At the end of every call right now, you should be saying, hey listen, before I let you go, while I got you, let me ask you this. If I had a great deal on a rental property, if I had a smoking hot deal on a rental property, would you be interested? And then just see what they say. And this could be your next investor client on your investor list that you're now looking on the hot sheet every day on MLS, looking to see if there's something that fits this, this investor's criteria, right? Then you get into a conversation. What do you like? Single family, multifamily, commercial. What do you like? And now you've got this new investor client here. And you could also use that to go prospect some of those sellers that own those type of investment properties and see if they might sell to your new investor client. But you should be asking this question, every single conversation, to see who you're talking to anyway, that's also an investor, because they're going to buy or sell. For example, me, I'm buying houses every month. If the market goes down, guess what? Buying houses. If the market continues to go up, guess what? Buying houses, selling houses, buying houses, flipping, flopping, sticking and moving. That's what investors do. You want a lot of these people, especially in times like this, build massive influence. So what you have to do right this second is you have to go all in with trying to meet as many people as you can. Now, whatever your lead gen source is, maybe it's social media, maybe it's cold calling, maybe it's door knocking, maybe it's open houses. I don't know what your thing is, but you need to go all in and try to talk to 5, 10, 15, 20 people a day, get them into your database to get the weekly email. Weekly email on the same day of the week forever. Weekly, weekly, weekly. That way they never forget you. And now you can build this snowball up to the point. And if you do this hard core over till the end of the year through January, February, going into 2024, guess what's going to happen? Your business is going to explode next year because we're going to have, next year is going to be a better year than this year, in my opinion. Who knows? In my opinion, it's going to be a better year. And if we're just setting yourself up now, you're going to be the one that has that better year. But not only that, like I said in 2026, watch out. All right. So building massive influence, talking to people you don't know, getting them to know you, getting them into your database and remarketing to them. It's not a complicated process. All right. And then stack listing. So I find it very interesting because there's markets, these little micro markets, like I'm going to Sarasota next week to speak at the border realtors and in their market, when the national inventory is down 17% across the nation, their inventory is up 25%. That's a big swing. There's more inventory. Days in the market up, prices are flat, even though national prices are up like 5% to 10% nationally. From January 1st, their market flat prices. So these micro markets are different, right? And it is local. Real estate is local. But when I look at that and one of my big messages next week when I go to speak is going to be like, oh my God, what an opportunity because in that market, you can literally build inventory. You can go out there and get 20, 30, 40 listings. You should, by the end of the year, you should have 40 listings in a market like that. When things are taking longer to sell, inventory is way up. You've got people listing their property. Like that is a market so you need to look in your local market and to understand what this data is. If you get a red fin and look at their, look at their data center, that's where I get a lot. That's where I like to look at a lot of that data. They took all that data out of the local MLSs. And it's a really interesting data. There's tons of it. And you can really get a real good handle. Also your local MLS, really digging in, watching the hot sheet every day, new listings, close deals, pendings, expires, all that stuff, right? Take 15 minutes every day and do that. That makes you a local market expert within a matter of a couple of weeks. It's just second nature at that point. Okay. So people that have to buy and sell. Okay. Huge opportunity right now. You need to really focus on those clients saving everybody else for a rainy day. Investors, stack your list of investor clients and use the line I showed you after every call to find out who those investors are you're talking to anyway. Ask everybody that question and figure out who they are. Start helping them find investments. Stack listings. Stack listings. That should go without saying and build your influence and try to take this thing to the next level. All right. And before I get into the final thoughts here, we're going to, when you start to understand the market cycles, like you stair step your income every single year through taking advantage of the yearly cycles. If you look at the yearly cycles, there's ups and downs every year. Prices go up and down every year. Whether you realize it or not, it happens. Transactions up and down, days in the market, all that stuff. And it's very, very seasonal. Every market's a little different. Dive into your local stats and figure out what those seasons are. But in the busy season, you're too busy selling to really prospect. But in the slow season, you got plenty of time to prospect and build your database larger to prepare for the next selling season. When you come into the next selling season, you're going into that selling season with more people to know who you are. So therefore, your business is more. You're closing more deals. Next year, you do it again. You stair stack your income every single time, every year. You do the same thing with the 10-year cycles. You take advantage of them. Don't do the same thing all the time. Just the same activities all year long. This, you know, be in the same pace, doing the same stuff because you're not, you're never really going to grow. You have to think database growth, how many people know who I am, how can I multiply this and really blow this thing up each and every year. And then when the big 10-year cycles hit, like they are right now, then you really double down so that your business triples, not just grows by 10-20%, but triples. All right? So the big bet right now, when you bet big on these market trends that you feel like is going to happen, like I did with the foreclosures back in 2008, that was my big bet. I said, let me go all in on buyers for foreclosures. I'm all in. And then I'm going to represent them on eight deals over the next five years and that's what happened. And I sold a ton of them and it was easy to sell. They were half off. It was like the easiest sell in the world. So I want you to... That's something to think about too. So I bet big on that, okay? Went all in and that's what happened. Now, if it didn't happen that way, and let's say it crashed even further, guess what? I still won because if prices went down even lower than they were, guess how easy it would have been to sell property? That's right. Very easy. Right now, if we go all in on trying to build as many relationships as we can with homeowners who want to sell but can't right now, focus on the people who have to buy and sell and stack our investor list. We're going to win short-term through the people that have to sell and the investors. We're going to win long-term because we're building this huge pipeline of people that are going to come out to woodworks when the market reverses. But what if this doesn't happen? What if rates don't go down or something happens and people don't come out to woodworks and people, you know, never really lists their homes. Something different happens. Let's say prices go down 30%. But you've been preparing for this big rush, Ricky said, what's going to happen? Well, you still win. If prices go down 30%, 40%, how easy is it going to be to sell those homes? Right? And that, if that happens, that means inventory went through the roof. So buyers now have their choice of what they want at a 30% discount. How hard is that going to be? Because remember, there will always be people that need to buy and sell. Investors, the investor list you're going to be stacking up, guess what they're going to be doing? Licking their chomps, trying to get in on all those deals. So I could go on and on here. I think I'm getting close to my time. There's a lot more to say. So, I'll ride with it here. But anyway, new listings, in my opinion, are going to spike. Transactions are going to spike. Active listings are going to drop. And you're going to look at active listings drop, and you're going to say, oh no. But transactions went through the mood. And you need to be the one doing all those deals. So the final thoughts here, the final thoughts here are to visualize what you're doing here. Don't back off of the market. Understand that this is a massive opportunity. Put a plan in place where your daily activities line up with where you want to be over the next three years. And go all in because you can have full confidence in the market overall that closings are going to happen every day, that it doesn't matter if what you think is going to happen doesn't come true. Doing what we're talking about. Doing here is going to put you in a position where you win either way. All right. I put my text number there. Text me there for all my free scripts, my email templates, all my stuff. And just text me there. 251-312-8844. You can message me on Instagram. Happy to help. Be a DXPcon. All that good stuff. Let me know what I can do to help you guys build your business. We'll talk to you guys soon.