 Okay guys, so here we are, middle of 2022. Yes, I was just talking to my father last weekend, we were sitting down and he's running the crew team, which is going amazing by the way. Thank you for asking. And we were talking about the second half of the year and I said, dad, we're fixing to have the busiest six months that we've had in a long, long time. And I'll tell you why. The crunch that interest rates and low inventory have put on transactions over the last three months or so has built up, in my opinion, so much pinned up demand. And I think this demand that hasn't went anywhere, right, lots of people want to buy houses. This is, this supply and demand issue is off the chains and it's gonna continue to be a problem for years and years and years to come. In my opinion, right, the interest rate hike made all the buyers take a step back and say, wait a minute, let me reevaluate the situation and see what I want to do here. Let's see what happens, right, but it's building up all this pinned up demand. Now, I'm not saying that we're gonna go out there and have so many more transactions, but in an environment, in an environment where listings are much easier to get this year than last year, where we're not getting so many multiple offers, where the buyers have a little room to breathe, not a lot of room to breathe on the really good listings, the ones that are priced right, but they have a little room to breathe here more than last year, okay, when you combine that, all right, we're in for an incredible second half of the year. If you're the kind of agent that is the progressive thinker that's thanking three to five years out, you know that this is a blip in the radar that closings are gonna continue to happen every single day, no matter what and you're out there continuing the game plan, talking to as many sellers as we can to see what we can do to help them, see what we can do to build that relationship, put them in our database, re-market to them, do weekly emails, do social media, if you're continuing on that path and you're not letting this market shift waver you from the course of where you know you wanna be in the next three to five years, you're gonna capitalize big time on the contrary if you're one of the agents who's been pulling back because your buyers pulled back and you never seen this kind of market shift before. There's gonna be a direct correlation between the moment that you pulled back and you having less closings. The agents that go all in right now, you're gonna have an enormous amount of closings the second half of the year and your 2023 is gonna be crazy off the chain, right? As the market makes these big moves, it doesn't affect us as far as what we do. We're here to talk to as many people as possible to see what we can do to help them. So today I wanna give you my six rules for real estate agents during the recession. I wanna give you four tips to go out and execute and capitalize on this situation. Before we get into that, I'm gonna answer the question of the day. This comes from Instagram. If you have a question, DM me on Instagram, I answer every single message myself. This agent says, yo, my man, question on emotion. Market's changing, so is my mentality. Last two years I was happy closing deals as real estate's going up. He was in this get in mentality. He was telling buyers, get in, get in, get in. Now he's saying that he kinda feels bad for representing buyers when he thinks that prices are gonna go down. He just feels a little bit anxious if market goes down and they'll feel bad for him. He says, should that be weight that we carry as real estate agents? Whereas we represent a buyer and then six months later, a year later, even two years later, the market goes down and you represented them on that purchase. I said, you should not carry that weight whatsoever. That's not on you. That wasn't your decision to buy that house. Your buyers and your clients and your sellers and everybody that makes a decision, they know they're making that decision at their own risk. That's not your risk. You're just trying to help them do whatever they're trying to do. You can't predict the future. That's not your job, right? You're not here to predict the market and help advise them based on what the market's gonna do. Your job is to figure out what it is they're trying to do and then help them do it. That's it. Now, as we sit right now in the market, prices are up. NAR just came out. Prices are up 14.8% year over year. They went up 3% from April to May. Those stats are out from month to month. It's up. Prices are still moving in that direction. Cells are down. Cells were down 8.6% month over month. We're down transaction-wise. Prices are still moving up. Pending deals. Pending deals were up 1.6%. And that was the first month and six months that we saw a positive increase month over month. We're still down 12% year to date on pending deals. But we did see an uptick. And what's very interesting is, is all this talk about worried about the interest rates, worried about the interest rates, right? Where are they gonna go? How it's gonna affect the market? And here we are in the last week. Interest rates went down like 7 tenths of a percent. Now, everybody feels like interest rates are gonna continue to move up. But this just goes to show you that that 7 tenth of a percent downside of interest rates in the last seven days or so, it's like guys, it doesn't matter what's going on out there. That's not our job to predict and worry and all this stuff. Go back to what I tell you every single time closings continue to happen. People are gonna continue to do deals. The problem is, you stop trying to talk to people to see what they wanna do and help them do it. That's what you need to be worried about. As far as crashes go, listen, last year we had an inventory crash. This year we're having a transaction crash, okay? There's always a sector in the market that is crashing, okay? Does it have to be prices for us to say, oh, it's official now? No, there's different sectors in the market. Wake up, guys. Now let's compare now to 2008, okay? Here's a few stats that I wrote down. Four more million millennials than Generation Xers back in 2007. Four more million, not four million total, four more million, okay, that are in their prime buying years, in their 30s, okay? That means for years to come, we're gonna see huge demand, massive demand, okay? They just came out with some data that said that housing starts are way down. Right now are way down from where they were 30 days, 60 days ago. Builders are pulling back. They're pulling back and recalibrating. They're gonna try to figure out exactly where they are and game plan around this new market that we're in so that they can go full force. Builders know inventory is the problem, which brings me to my next stat. In 2008, there was way more inventory. Right now there's way less inventory. We have 2.6 months of inventory. Five months of inventory is a balanced market between buyers and sellers. We're so far away, it's not even funny. Back in 2007, we had 2.7 million housing starts, okay? Right now we have 1.3 million housing starts. That's a big, big, it's almost half. And on top of everything else, the lending situation, the tighter lending restrictions. Back in 2005, six, three, four, five, I was there. I was buying properties. I was just saying, hey, I'm making a million dollars and just signing, was I making a million dollars? Yes, did they check? No, they didn't check to see if I was really making that money. They just gave me the money. You think you could do that now? Absolutely not. They're making sure that these buyers are qualified. Anyway, the stats keep going and going and going. I want to take a moment before I get into my six rules here to thank Inman for naming me Top 22 Instagram account to follow for real estate agents and Top 22 YouTube channels to follow for real estate agents. So thank you, Inman, so much for that. Also, I'm doing a once a week Zoom call right now through the 60 day challenge at zero-to-diamond.com. Monday at noon central is gonna be our week number two Zoom call. Last week was the first week of the 60 day challenge. We had over 800 agents on that Zoom call. It was incredible. So I'm gonna put a link in the description here or you can go to zero-to-diamond.com backslash team call for the Zoom link and that's gonna be Monday noon central. And then Friday, July 14th, I'm gonna be in San Antonio for our zero-to-diamond tour. We're gonna have multiple speakers. It's gonna be an incredible event. I'm gonna put a link in the description there or you can go to zero-to-diamond.com backslash events. Now, as I get into these six rules and four tips, I want you to know that I got out of the business from 2005 to 2008, okay? I got back in the business in 2008 after I learned all the stuff that I teach in zero-to-diamond. And from that point, I went all in with building relationships with every single person I could in my market, building my database out, doing my weekly email and that took me to that 100 deal a year mark by 2014. And I did 100 deals a year every year since to 2021, eight years in a row. And it was because of the fact that I went all in during the downturn. So I want you guys to know that this is your moment. The next six months are gonna be incredible but more than that, the next 18 months, if you go all in now, right, you're gonna be set. This could set you up for the next three to five years. You're gonna see the top producers emerge out of this, right? And you're gonna see the average agents who pulled back during these times. So are you gonna be the agent that goes all in or are you gonna be the agent that pulls back during this time? So here are my six rules for real estate agents during a recession. Rule number one, closings continue to happen every single day for the rest of your life by the truckloads regardless of market conditions. Rule number two, there's always a three month bridge from the moment that something shocks the market into a shift, right? That three month bridge takes us from the old market to the new market, the new normal. And during that three month period, most of your clients and a lot of agents are gonna act like it's the end of the world, okay? This is totally normal. So don't let it freak you out. Rule number three, as the market does, normalize. And we get to that new normal which we are almost there, okay? You're gonna have so much more confidence when you're advising clients because we're gonna have market data that shows us exactly where we are. When the bridge starts to happen and that shift starts to happen, that three month period, things are a little confusing. What's going on? What are things priced at? How do we price things? How do we advise buyers? What do we do? But as we normalize, then we know exactly how to advise our clients. So you can speak with a lot more confidence once we're through that period. Rule number four, as the market shifts, it shifts very slow. So it's really easy to stay ahead of the curve mentally. As for an example, right now, as we see transactions come down, we see prices still going up. It's not like everything just went to zero all of a sudden. There's still plenty of business going on. And all this stuff is moving in slow motion, okay guys? So again, don't let any of this freak you out. Stay the course. Keep doing what we're supposed to do. Rule number five, as the market starts to shift, it's gonna scare off tons of agents who more than likely we're not selling any real estate anyway out of the business. It's gonna scare them right out of the business. And that's what we're seeing right now. We're seeing a lot of agents get out of the business. They're not viable agents. And what that creates is a scenario where we see transactions per agent increase, right? As the transactions go down, let's say transactions go down 6%, right? From what I could tell, and it's not exactly correlated, but most of the time I've seen more agents leave the business than transactions. Which means what? More transactions per agent. Now, transactions per viable agent is always gonna stay pretty much the same because the viable agents, the ones actually selling real estate who are actually in the business, they're not getting out of the business. They're the ones doing all the deals anyway. What you wanna do is become one of the viable agents. And rule number six, if you're one of the agents who continues to grind through the retraction of the market to acquire more market share, which is what I wanna talk about in just a second, okay? As you acquire market share during that retraction, as the market rebounds, your business will explode like an atomic bomb. And that's what happened to me. I went so hard during that 2008, nine, 10 and 11, as when the market rebounded in 2012, 13 and 14. 14 was the first year it closed 100 deals. It was from all the work I did when the market was down. So your business will explode if you go all in it. And look how long it took. It was, I went eight, nine, 10, 11. It was four years of the down, right? And then 12, 13, 14, three years right there before I hit that 100 deals. None of this happens overnight, but it came from the built up momentum that I created as the market was down. So let's dive into these four tips that I want you to really concentrate on as we move through this recession, okay? So tip number one, I want you to communicate better. I want you to work on your communication skills to the point that you know how to articulate who you are as a person. The problem that I believe that I'm seeing with your communication with a lot of agents is the fact that you're saying that you're running into mean people or ugly people or people that just aren't so nice when in fact they answered the phone. They gave you an opportunity to show them who you are and you gave them some kind of red flag that made them flip the script, right? I want you to move away from the 1980s high pressure, objection handling, get people to sign the line, awkward script and move towards listening to your clients about what they want to do and then simply help them do it. We're in a service industry in my opinion, not a sales industry. If you'll sit back and really listen to what they want to do and quit focusing on what you want them to do, then you're gonna find much more success. You're gonna sell more property and you're gonna get more lifelong clients that refer you time and time and time again. This is how I've sold so much real estate in my career. Tip number two, I want you to go all in on social media. I want you to spend all morning making your calls. I want you to have all afternoon to work on your marketing, your branding and all of that stuff. I want you to create content. I want you to engage. I want you to like and comment under everybody's posts that you're following or that's in your area. I want you to follow people, DM people. And I want you to create content. Go on TikTok, go on Instagram, go on Facebook. Search your area. Engage with people that are in your market. Tip number three, when you've set aside time to do a project, say to make a three hour call session or to create a video, I want you to ignore every single notification that comes through. We're so reactive. In this world that we live in that's so fast paced, we're just reacting to every little thing, jumping three feet in the air every time a notification deems our phone. I want you to get really good at taking your life back, taking control of your business, not letting it control you. I want you to really practice this for at least two hours a day, ignore everything that comes through your phone as much as it might hurt. I want you to ignore and see how it makes you feel. You're gonna feel so liberated. You're gonna feel like, man, you're gonna feel this weight lifted off your shoulder. It's gonna be a breath of fresh air. Why? Cause all that stuff's gonna be still waiting for you two hours later. Spend that time to focus on your business, on your short and long-term business because the average agents are gonna react to everything all day long. If you're reacting to everything all day long, you're an average agent. You're never gonna hit the pinnacle cause you're not taking time and really dedicating and focusing on building that massive business where you're accumulating relationships over time. And the reactionary average agent works just as hard as that future mega agent, right? But they just can't sit down and focus on the projects that's gonna get them there. And tip number four, I want you to focus on volume, okay? I want you to focus on volume of clients, volume of prospects, volume in your database because guys, here's the plain and simple fact. If you don't have volume in your database, you don't have volume in sales. It's not gonna happen. Quit hiding behind quality. So many agents I know spend so much time on each client, one client here, they're spending so much time on each client and I know what they're doing. They're subconsciously using that as an excuse and justifying the fact that they're not making calls or they're not doing what they need to do to prospect to really build that massive business. And they're just chalking it up to the fact that they're going all in and trying to provide the best service. That's not good because at some point, it's gotta be about volume. I'm all about quality, but at what point is it gonna be about quantity? So that's it guys, you got your six rules for real estate agents during the recession. You got your four tips for me to really go all in here and I hope that something here hit home with you and you're able to take this back to your business and go crush it, okay? I love you guys so much. Keep pushing, keep doing what you're doing. The market is incredible. These next six months are gonna be amazing. Go all in with me, all right? We'll see you guys on the next video. Till then, take care.