 This has been a year and a half of higher rates that is built up to this moment. And now we're about to go into January where it normally takes off and we have all this pent up demand and retracted market. So what I'm saying is, is right now, here's the opportunity. Right now, you gotta get as many listings as you can in December because everything in January is going under contract. And if you let this moment go by where you don't take advantage and stack up as much inventory as you can, when January hits and you're busy, you're selling, you'll be doing good and everything, but you're going to wish to God, you would have stacked up as many, at least as many as you could, now, while things are slow, while you have time to actually do it before the wave actually hits and you don't have time to do it anymore, plus the wave's hitting, it's too late. You gotta get, well, when do you prepare for a market surge during the surge or before the surge? Okay, before. And that's right now. And every day that goes by is just one more day of a lost opportunity because these days are clicking by real fast. And we, starting last week, we had four full work weeks with no holidays in between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Christmas is gonna hit Monday in like three weeks. You had four full work weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas to really crush it. So like time block prospecting and go harder than you've ever went before. That's what you need to be doing. And a lot of us during this time of year, we kinda just lay back, well, the market's slow. You know, what's the use? People aren't doing anything anyway. Listings are just sitting there, blah, blah, blah. Okay, this is the calm before the storm. If you wanna be like massive, like high, high producer, you've got to realize these cycles and take advantage of the moments. Otherwise, you're just gonna be following the sheep, the rest of the agents in the industry and just be average or be a low producer and just stay there forever. Yeah, this is the kinda stuff that I started realizing in 2008. These ebbs and flows of the market and how to take advantage of the down moments to ramp up before the next surge happens. Yeah, this is it right now. So yeah, a little pep talk for you. Let's see if you guys have some questions. I'd love to dig into some of your specific situations. And if not, I can just keep rambling because I can ramble all day long. Feel free to unmute, right? Tell me what's going on in your business. Come on in, Jeff. Unmute, Jeff, and ask your question. I was just wondering, obviously, there's gonna be pent up demand. Yeah, but again, the usual grill in the room is there gonna be inventory to support the demand? It doesn't matter about inventory. And I'm speaking to a chair. It doesn't matter what inventory is. Here's the thing. When let's just take the example, the theory, the circumstance that rates come down, okay? When are rates gonna come down? Nobody knows that. All the gurus in the mortgage industry thought that rates would be around 5% at the end of this year. Well, they were wrong. They were right about inflation coming down, right? And they thought, okay, inflation comes down and the 10-year treasury follows inflation and mortgage rates follow the 10-year treasury. They're right about all that, but you know where they got it wrong? They didn't realize that the spread between the 10-year treasury and the mortgage rate was gonna be higher than normal because the investors don't want the risk and they know people aren't really gonna hang on to these higher rates. They're gonna refinance pretty soon. They're not gonna make much on the loan. And so they had to have this higher spread. So they didn't put that into consideration. So predicting rates, bad game to play. However, when rates come down, let's just think about the world when rates come down, okay, when rates come down, this is what I see happening is that the trade-up seller is gonna list and buy, right? They're gonna list their home and upgrade. They're tighter their home. This is like huge, this is a huge market. I mean, I could even ask you guys, like how many sellers do you have that want to sell? They don't need, they need an extra bedroom. They wanna be on the water. They need to move across town, but they can't because they're sitting on this low rate and they just can't do it. How many of those clients do you have, right? How many buyers do you have? First time home buyers that are waiting on prices to come down are waiting on rates to come down. Like it's crazy. So when rates come down, let's just think about this hypothetical situation that the trade-up seller lists and then upgrades. So what does that do to the market in terms of inventory? Well, they're adding one to inventory, but then they're taking one away from inventory. So it's a net even for inventory, okay? So that didn't do anything to inventory, but it created two transactions. So inventory stayed the same overall, active listings, but we have two plus on the transaction board, okay? So activity has increased. Now we've got two deals, two commissions, really four because there's a buyer and seller on each deal, okay? But then the first time home buyers come in, they rush the market. They take a property off the market, but they don't add a property to the market. So what does that do to active listings? It brings it down, but it created a transaction. So what happens in my opinion when rates come down is we're gonna see transactions spike. Transactions are gonna go boop, but active listings are gonna come down, okay? So inventory doesn't have to come up. Who was it, Jeff? Inventory doesn't have to come up for activity and transactions to spike. See what I'm saying? We can live in a world. I'll take your question and say, we can live in a world where inventory goes down, but our business is all explode. See what I'm saying? So you have to realize we can't control rates or inventory or any of that stuff. What we got to do is our best to make sure the most people that own property in our market know who we are and feel like we're their friend and never forget us. That's all. That's all we can control. That's all we can do. And then we let the market kind of play out however it plays out. We're just here to help and service our people. Whatever inventory does or this that I don't know, don't care. Right? Transactions are gonna spike regardless. They're gonna come back. Go ahead. I'm listening. Linda, was it you? Who had a question? I've got a question. I've been farming two farms for 15, 25 years. And 15, 25 years. Got it. And I've gotten a lot of sales from it. But over the last couple of years, I've had zero response to my marketing and I can't afford to do it anymore. Just wondering what you're. A lot of flyers, basically magnets, they would update. Yeah, have you called those people? Do you ever call through the subdivisions? I know. Why wouldn't you? Oh, and I'm not a great. Fun guy, I guess. And I'm not a doorknocker. Maybe I should be. Well, Jim, let me let me just let me just give you my two cents. The the premise of your job as a real estate agent is to talk to people you do and don't know to help them buy some real estate. So so your job is to talk to people that you do and don't know to help them buy some real estate. So why don't you just do that? Sending out mailers is great, guys. Doing videos on social is great, guys. You know, doing, you know, having billboards and doing open houses and doing all this stuff is great, guys. But if you're not talking to people that you do and don't know all day long to help them buy and sell real estate, you're not doing your job. You can't just sit around the office and send mailers out and be like, you know, my business isn't doing anything. Like, did you expect did you expect Jim for that to like blow your business up? It used to. Well, well, I don't want to dig into like what that business actually looked like. OK, but let me just say it could be 15 times bigger. It could have been 15 times bigger than and you could be blowing up right now. See, what you got to realize is that this is kind of far out there to think about it like this. OK, I'll break it down from the furthest out in space all the way back down to maybe around the moon and then we'll bring it down to earth. The first thing is, is how many how many humans do you guys think will ever live on the planet? There's there's like eight billion now, right? How many humans you think will ever live on the planet? You think it will hit a trillion? Who knows, right? Half a trillion, a hundred million, I mean, a hundred billion, two hundred billion. I don't know. OK, a lot. What are the chances that another human being lives during the same time that you do? Not only that, in the same area you do, what are the chances pretty much like one in a trillion? Let's just say if there's going to be a trillion people ever live on earth, one in a trillion is the chances that this person lives next to you in the same time. All right, if you were on a bus in Paris and you're on a three hour, you know, train ride and there was this guy sitting across from you mean mugging, looking really mad. And you're like, man, that guy just seems angry. I don't want to talk to him. Something happens, you drop something, you bump in and you guys start talking and come to find out. They're pretty nice. And then you're like, where are you from? And they're like D.C. As soon as he said D.C., wouldn't you feel like automatically connect? Like you have a connection with this person now you're in Paris. You realize that you're both from D.C. Wouldn't you be like, wow, we're both from D.C. You feel this connection with them, right? What I'm what I'm getting at is that anyone in your market that lives anywhere should literally be looked at as family. Like you should look you should look at that. They're these are your neighbors. Like what are the chances that that a human lives in your area? It's like so low. It's it's it's like lightning striking the same spot 15 times. Ricky, I watch one of your videos where you just like a little call warm up. You used to do. I'm sure this is not the first time you've said somebody say that they don't love making phone calls. But you sort of said you made a lot of cold calls, not even the relationships that knew you. You called the mean Munga guy on the bus and just started a conversation and worked to create a relationship. But you kind of shared it was like a four or five people on the front end that you would call just to get things started and get yourself in the right headspace, could you kind of share them? Like what might jumpstart those phone calls for them? Do you remember what you said? I can remind you if you don't. But there's a couple of different things you can do. You know, you can take the first couple calls to do follow up with people that you're currently kind of following up with, right? You know, even past clients, call a couple of past clients, check on them, see how they're doing or whatever and kind of warm up a little bit, kind of helps you kind of, you know, get past, kind of get warmed up and now you're kind of ready to roll. You know, send them mail. See, Jim, you're in the perfect position because you've sent these people like calendars and postcards and flyers forever. You know, like when you call them, they know exactly who you are. You know, you can be like, hey, I'm Jim. I'm the guy that, you know, did you get my calendar? Then we're like, hey, Jim, yeah, I've been getting your stuff for years. Thought you'd never call, right? You've got to, you've got to reach out to these people or you're just dead in the water, guys. If you're not talking to people all day long about buying a selling real estate, then you're dead in the water. It's not, it's not going to work. It's not going to work for you, especially in a market like this where, you know, we just had historic pending deals on the report. Um, you know, listen, if you look at all the Legion activities, okay, every single one of them, okay, social media, Zillow leads, open houses, you know, mail outs, cold calls, door knocking, sphere of influence. Just think of every single one of them, okay? Every single one of those activities comes right back to the same thing. Okay, it's a, those, those are like top line funnel that come right back to the exact same thing every single time before there's a transaction. Okay. What's that single thing that everything comes back to every single time before there's ever even a chance for a transaction? I'm talking. Conversation. It doesn't matter if it's a Zillow lead, open house lead, you know, you got them on social, you know, whatever it is until you talk to them, nothing will happen. So when I realized that I was like, oh, okay. Like you mean I don't have to do all that stuff. I can just call the people I want to do business with and have the conversation right now. I don't have to spend time, money and energy on all the stuff most agents do. I can literally hack the entire system and just call the people because it comes right back to the conversation anyway. Why don't I just have conversations instead of like wasting my time doing millers and open houses and making videos and running ads and buying Zillow leads and all the stuff that people do. I was like, why don't I want to spend time, money and energy doing that? Those inefficient activities. When I could just call the exact person I want to do business with for a penny. Why wouldn't I just do that? Yeah. Personal fear of the phone call is fine, Kendra, but the thing is, is all these things come right back to you talking to them on the phone. It's crazy the amount of money, like the thousands of dollars that agents spend to try to not make calls, to just turn around and call the leads that they spent thousands of dollars on. It's crazy, guys. It's a little bit, you're trying to get around something that you can't get around. Remember, it all comes back to this same thing. Right? So why not in your mind, if you're like, oh, well, it's a warm lead. It's a Zillow lead. It's a postcard. It's a mail out. It's an open house. It's a warm lead. Okay. Well, if you want to be Mr. Mega Agent, why don't you just do some reverse psychology on yourself and just take a list of every property owner that owns property that you want to represent and pretend in your mind that they're a Zillow lead or pretend in your mind that they're an open house lead or that they called about your postcard or whatever you got to tell yourself to get in the mindset that this is not a cold lead because guess what? It's not a cold lead. This person lives in your area. Like this is your neighbor. You should feel like most comfortable calling these people and saying how you're doing and introducing yourself and seeing what's going on with them today and letting them know what you do, who you are, and that you're here to help. You're not trying to sell them, by the way. You're not trying to see if they want to buy or sell something. You're just letting them know who you are, what you do, and that you're here to help. You don't want to do anything great. Is there an agent you would work with if you were to do something? No? Well, cool. Well, listen, I'm sure you'll do something at some point. Maybe not even for another five or 10 years. Either way, I'd love the opportunity to work with you in that day comes. I'd be hard if I just stayed in touch. Yeah? Great. What's a good email? Boom. Weekly email, done. Stack that to the moon, done. Done. So the only thing between you guys and a million dollars a year are thousands of one-on-one conversations with people in your market. That's it. You can stretch those thousands of conversations over the course of 20 years, 30 years, 40 years for the rest of your life, or you can smash them all into a good three to five years and be done with it. Get to the million dollars a year and move on to bigger and better things. Buying properties, coaching, speaking, writing, whatever you want to do. The world is your oyster at that moment because you're making a million bucks and you're just doing a weekly email every week and you don't have to prospect anymore. Why don't we just build that business now? Instead of like playing around with just sending mail outs forever, hoping that something happens. I don't need to live in a world of hope. Guys, I want to make a million bucks now so I can move on to something else. So, ask your question then. My ears are wide open. So, you have plenty of people on here. Okay, let's say they want to go make their calls. They go and they pull a database of numbers, you know, through Reiner or another source to have the addresses. What are your recommendations for them? Get the phone numbers and then to be able to scrub them against the DNC list because, you know, this is the DC metro area where we have more. We have more lawyers and approaches. So, I'll put a link right here, redaxdiscount.com to get a discount there and just get GeoLeads Plus. You can get 7500 property ownership of your choice. It marks some DNC. Like it marks the DNCs and you don't have to call them if you don't want to. I call them because number one, they're the highest quality phone number. But number two, I'm not calling to sell these people. Again, I'm not calling to sell them. I'm calling to introduce myself. I'm calling to see if there's something I could do to help them. I'm calling to offer a friend, I'm a friendship. I'm calling to see how they're doing and what's going on. I'm thinking about doing anything if there's something I could do to help. So, oh, here, I'll put this here. I've got a platform where you can get all my scripts and all that stuff for free. Joinrickie.com. Weekly email, my weekly email templates are there. All my scripts are there. Everything. What do you think about door knocking? Because I think it's even further than called calling. You're even face-to-face to the people you meet. Like, it's even better. Here's the thing. It's whatever works for you. So, like, what I'm talking about is I'm just going to call everybody. That doesn't work for everyone. I understand that. I'm empathetic towards it. If you want to crush it on social media and it works, and I know people that sold $100 million, several agents sold $100 million on YouTube and TikTok in the past couple years, you know, if that's what you want to do, great. For me, social media kind of attracts more buyers than sellers. So, everybody has to make a decision, right? You know, everybody's going to make money at, say, 7 o'clock at night. The question is, are you going to be home chilling with your family eating dinner while eight of your, you know, 21 listings are being shown, right? Or are you going to be the agent on TikTok who's out showing the properties at 7 o'clock at night because you've got a bunch of buyers coming in? See, we have a choice of how we want to structure our business and everything. As far as door knocking versus cold calling versus open houses, right? It's what works best for you. I don't care what you do. The bottom line is, if you're not talking to people that you do and don't know to help them buy and sell real estate, you're dead. You're not doing nothing. You're not being productive. You're not doing nothing. Nothing. So, like, if you like, if you like door knocking, go knock yourself out. I never door knock because I grew up roofing houses and I'm like, I'm not going to go out in the sunshine if I don't have to. Like, I got enough of that growing up. If I can sit in the air conditioned environment and just like click a few buttons and talk to hundreds of people, well, by all means, that sounds like the most efficient thing for me to do. If I go door knock and three people don't answer, I've got to walk to each house. Hell, I could have dialed like 30 numbers during that same time at the office sitting in the air conditioning. That's just me. You may love door knocking. If you do, go crush it. I don't care what you do. Just do something. I mean, door knocking could be even with commercial. Like, you don't need to be door knocking to homes. You could be door knocking to retail stores, people who own little boutiques. There are, they could be also sellers and buyers too. And it's maybe better to reach them in the day, you know? Figure out, listen, all of the, okay, if you take the weirdest prospecting methods that you've ever heard of, okay, you guys can type something in if you want to. Like, what's the weirdest, craziest, strangest lead gen activity you ever heard of? I promise you, the craziest, weirdest ones, even those, people are making a million bucks a year off of them. Every single lead gen activity works. So, I'm not going to sit here and tell you, oh, we'll do the door knock to commercial people. Don't door knock to commercial people. I don't care. But you better, again, just talking to thousands of one-on-one people. Whatever gets you to talk to thousands of people one-on-one, over the next three to five years to get to that million bucks a year, I don't care what the path is that you choose to do it. You got to figure out what works best for you. I can't do that for you. But whatever you can tell yourself to go do it, great. Go do it. Thank you. Ricky, you mentioned you had one, I guess, an admin person, ISA. At what point did you bring that person on and how did it expand? I never had an ISA. I never had an ISA. Nobody ever made calls for me. I brought on an assistant to handle all my admin stuff. So, when I got to 30 active listings, I couldn't handle all the showing requests from other buyers, from other agents trying to show my listings. And it bogged me down. I couldn't do my prospecting. I couldn't do all my stuff I wanted to do to continue to build my business. So, that was the first. So, it depends on what the bottleneck becomes in your business. If you're chugging along and you're doing two deals a month and you're handling everything on your own, great. You're good. But when you get to five and 10 deals a month and you find those bottlenecks in your specific business, that's going to be different than my bottlenecks. It's going to be different than Craig's bottlenecks. It's going to be different than Jim's bottlenecks. Everybody has a different bottleneck in their business from how they operate. And so, whatever that bottleneck becomes, that's what you hire somebody to take over. And then you start handing them everything else once they take that off your shoulders. So, she came in. She started setting up the showings for agents wanting to show my listings. And then I started handing her all the transaction coordination stuff and then all the MLS stuff. And then she started doing the postcards and all the other things for me. So, bottleneck and then you kind of reverse it into all the other things that you need them to do. So, a follow-up on that then. So, how do you, what would you say as far as going from that two deals a month, getting stuck at that? To blowing it out and obviously talking with a lot of people and getting a lot of people in your database is a big part of that. But anything else you could... No, there's nothing else. See, that's the simplicity of it. People hear what I'm saying and they're like, Oh, it can't be that simple. It is that simple. If you're stagnant in your business, that means you quit building your database. You just quit building. You quit talking to people you don't know, adding them to your database and then doing your weekly email and all that stuff. You quit building. That's it. When you see these agents that make 200,000 every year forever, they never go above that. They just make that forever and they don't know why. They're living in a mirage because they're getting business and they think any day their business is going to take off, but they quit building their database. They built their database up to the point that they're making 200, then they quit. Then they're just living off the database. When you get to where you're living off your database, you're going to make the same amount of money every year. So, if you build your database up to a million bucks a year and then quit, you live off the database, you make a million bucks a year every year. That's what happened to me. If you're stagnant, it's because you quit building your database. So, continue building your database, putting people in there. Have your lead gen activities that work best for you. Time blog those, crush those, meet new people, create new friends, put them in your database, continue marketing to them so they never forget who you are. It's real simple. How many phone calls do you make a day in average just for us to have an idea about? Back when I built my business, we didn't have dialers. That's not so crazy about what's happening right now. We didn't have autodialers. So, I had a hand dial. You know, this is like the early 2000s, late 2000s, the early 2010s, you know, when I was really in my building stages. So, I would dial 100 a day and it took me from nine to three. And a lot of people say, oh, I'll hand out 100 numbers in a couple hours. Bullshit. Like I did that. I did it so many times that I know how long it takes to hand out 100 numbers. Okay. It takes that long. And then I would do handwritten letters from like, from, you know, after three, I would do handwritten letters. I would follow up with people, do some emails. And then about five o'clock, I would start looking up numbers to call the next day, which took me like three hours to look up 100 numbers. Because I did it one at a time on Spokio.com, Bigfoot.com, WhitePages.com, Google. I had to look all these up one at a time. I didn't have RedX and the data to be able to go click, click, boom, and get thousands of people's cell phone numbers and then click another button and auto dial them 100 an hour. It's crazy. But I wouldn't, you're muted, but I wouldn't focus on how many, I would focus on how many hours I committed to make the call. So, you can't control if people are going to answer, not answer, talk to you for 30 minutes. You can't control all those different things. But you can control, hey, I said I was going to make calls from 9 to 12. I'm going to make calls from 9 to 12. I'm going to make calls solid from 9 to 12 no matter what happens. I'm going to make calls during that time. And you may have a call session where you have three people talk to you for 30 minutes this time. Next time, you talk to way more people. They were shorter conversations. Just put the hours in and just don't worry about the results. Just do your best to try to become a better communicator. Every call session, you learn a little bit about how to talk and kind of what worked and what didn't work and how to make people feel comfortable with you. And you use that on the next call session and then you get better that call session for the next call session. You use that to get better for the next call session. So, commit the time is the most important. Exactly. Just the hours that you decided to do it. A good like back of the mind goal is to make five new friends a day with property owners. If you make five new friends a day with property owners, 250 working days a year, that's 6,000 over five years. You got 6,000 friends with property owners that are getting a weekly email from you on the same day of the week forever with your opinions on stuff, not generic stuff. Don't hire a company to do your email for you guys. Sit down and write it yourself based on how you're feeling about stuff. New listings, new restaurants, market stats, good deals, articles, developments coming. Put your stuff in there. And I actually have a four-week email template system and I actually have four weeks templates where you can just plug and play. If you go to that joinricky.com link, yeah, it takes you to Gold Bar. Gold Bar is the platform. It's all for free there. I've got and you can see every email I did for a year to my clients for the past year. You can see every email I did. Look at it. Get ideas. Use that stuff. Boyd just answered your question and Ricky just did, but Gold Bar is a training platform. So it's got all his stuff on there. It's not a scam. That's it. Yep, I got it. Thank you. I don't see the scripts however, but I'll find them. Yeah, it's right there. As soon as you make an account, it's right there. It says scripts and email templates. You know, Ricky, I just to summarize what you've been saying is it all comes back to talking to people. And I think that that everybody signs on to programs like this, hoping that you're going to tell them something that they can do that's going to make it so that they don't have to talk to people. And what I hear you saying for the last 40 minutes is you got to talk to people. And I think that we're just resistant to that. And it's it's just that we do have a I did create a challenge where we do handwritten letters first. The handwritten letters actually do get listings, but the magic behind it is to call after the letters. So this has been a one size fits all, whether you're an introvert, an extrovert, if you're new, if you're experienced, if you want to ramp up your business and really get straight to the source of property owners and everything. We've developed this program where we're doing 30 day listing challenges right there on that Gold Bar platform every month. Weekly calls, the letters, the phone calls. We keep a leaderboard of how many whoever gets the most listings. We give prizes and all that good stuff. So we have something that even the extroverts don't want to make the calls makes it easier because they do the letters. They get they get some they get some calls, but then it's easier to make the calls because you're calling about the letter you sent. So it makes it a little easier, you know, for some people. But again, you know, the people that really blow this business out of the water, they just have no fear. You know, they're just happy to call anybody about anything, to talk to them, see how they're doing, see what they could do to help them. And they do it very consistently. Yeah, I think people are scared to call because they feel like they're going to ask for something. But actually, you're not asking for something. You're offering something. It wouldn't matter if I was asking for something, offering something that that again is just another excuse. Another cop out people use. It doesn't matter what you're doing, what you're calling them about. Call them, call them, treat them like family. Yeah, this is what you guys need to think of, okay? If this were my mom, what would I say? If this were my dad, if this were my brother, if this was my daughter, if this was my close family, it's like when when when, you know, if somebody wants to sell something, you're going on a listing appointment, okay? For example, think in your mind, if this were my mom, how would I handle this? What there are questions I would be asking. What are my mannerisms? How is my body language? How am I going to handle this situation? Think, well, how would I treat this person if it were my dad, if my mom, my cousin, my uncle, my best friend from high school, people I'm very comfortable with, people I'm really close with, people I love. When I got that, when I realized that my prospects needed to be treated exactly like a treat my family, that's when my business exploded. Because people felt it, because I wasn't there to make money. I was there to really figure out what they're trying to do and why and help them do it. That's, that's amazing. It is amazing. And that's why I decided to write books and start coaching and stuff. Because no coach talks about this stuff. So I want to just pivot over to the lawsuits. A lot of people are worried about what they can and can't say and how they should approach that. I'm kind of the opinion that we just keep doing business for the most part, like we've been doing business. But what do you take? Yeah, absolutely do. It's really a non-issue at all. You handle every situation as it comes. If somebody brings it up and wants to not try, not pay a buyer agent commission or something, fine. We call those pocket listings. We call those for sale by owners. If you don't want to pay, if you don't want to offer to pay the buyer agent, what's so crazy is when all this started, it's really, it's just a money grab guys. It's just, it's just, and they don't really care what happens to the industry and stuff. It's like the sellers agreed to pay this commission. They were happy with what they netted. They were happy to pay the 5% or 6% regardless if there was a buyer agent involved or not. So it's like, you're happy to pay the 5%. When it was me, why do you care if I take some of the 5% that you agree to pay me and another agent gets some of that? Why do you care so much? If I represent the buyer or whatever and I get the full commission, you don't care, but you do care if there's a buyer agent involved. It's no more money that you paid. It's really just a money grab. For everybody and I think it'll get shot down honestly, but you never know with the way everything's ran and you guys as a city, you never know how all this could play out. There's people that think that MLS will change the rules to where you can't offer a buyer agent commission. We'll just put it in the contract and make the offer. But yeah, it's really a non-issue. If they change the rules dramatically, we could lose a lot of agents who just are scaredy cats. Let's just call them. They're just going to run away. They don't know how to handle and how to adapt. What's going to happen is agents that stay are going to get more market share. And they're going to do far better than we were doing before. But just think about it. If they ban commissions from MLS, the only reason to really poach your listing there is to syndicate it to Zillow. Well, if they ban buyer commission, now Zillow isn't making money on their flex program for giving buyer leads. So then they're not going to allow the syndication. I wouldn't think that Zillow would allow the syndication at that point because they're going to want to pay to play now. Now they're going to want us to pay to put our listings on Zillow. Well, in that world, what's the point of putting a property on MLS? You're not advertised into the other agents because you're not paying them anything. And it's not getting syndicated to Zillow to get to the buyers. So now what's the purpose of putting the property on MLS? There's not going to be one. So now in that world, now we live in a world where buyers don't see every property for sale in one spot. So now what happens? Commissions go up. Why? Because now buyers, agents who actually have a buyer are far more valuable in a world where the buyer can't see all the listings. And now if you got an agent that has a seller who might sell or even you have a seller yourself, you're looking at the seller like, hey, I got a buyer, but what are you going to pay me? Because I can just take my buyer to another listing. So in that world, it's going to be like commercial is now. The residential world will turn into what commercial actually is right this second where things are very pocket listed. Things are kind of under the radar. And commissions actually are a little higher. You just, it takes a little more savvy of an agent to live in that world because the world we have been living in is a lot simpler. But and it's great for consumers because they get to see everything. That's what's so good about it. And they get representation without coming out of their pocket. So the world now is like really, really incredible. And they're just trying to crush it and crash and burn it. But in the opposite world, worst case scenario and stuff, the more business savvy agents will really do well, really do phenomenal. You basically create your own market where you have your own buyers and sellers. Pretty much double into everything just about. You may have some agents you're friends with that you do deals with. And that's worst case scenario though. And like the agents that are just like buyers agents and they get handed leads from Zillow or team leaders and stuff like that, those agents may be the first ones to go. It's going to be the top business savvy agents that will stay. So that, I mean, look, if you're a buyer type agent, go become a business savvy agent that can go out there and get listings at will. Go ahead and start sharpening your skills to go out there and become one of the greatest listing agents that the planet's ever seen. Hold on, guys. I got a little special guest. I think we're watching a family moment here. He's shy. Guys, you're watching somebody who's got his values in the right place. Oh, you found the elf. Where was he today? Watch you some Christmas tree cookies. So, yeah, listen, nothing to worry about on that wall suit thing. It'd actually be fun. If that happened, we lose a ton of agents and it would be it would be a lot of fun because we'd make more money. So bring it on. I like that attitude. Anybody else have any questions right now? I fought one on the on the chat looking to get some ideas. We see listings coming out already where there's an offer by a commission much less than what I have, let's say, in my representation contract. And so any ideas, Ricky, on how to work that back into the contract, into the offer conversations with the seller's agent, which seemed to be forbidden up till now? I wouldn't worry about what the listing agent is getting because, honestly, we don't know what the listing agent's getting, or we don't really know what the listing agent's getting. Here, you see the buyer agent commission. I don't know what the listing agent commission. The buyer agent commissions are like 2.4, and then I'll go to closing the listing agent's getting like four, some four or five or something. This is like what in the world is going on here. But I would just put it in the contract. Like, what do you normally get for a buyer? What's your what's your standard? What do you happy with? What do you normally want on a buyer agent commission? Well, we see a lot of two and a half. Two and a half. Yeah. So you could put two and a half. I would just put in other provisions. Seller to pay, buyer agent commission of two and a half percent, or three percent, or whatever it is that you want. You might want to start out at three, and then negotiate down if you have to, you know, or something like that. But I would just start putting it in the contract every time. You know, unless it's stated on MLS, you know, that it's two and a half or three, or unless it's a standard deal, you know, everything's like it normally is. But if it's one of these like discounted one-offs, or zero, or whatever, put it in the contract, you know, and then let them figure it out. They need to figure out what they need to counter back at to cover your fee, et cetera. Okay. Thanks, Ricky. Yeah, ma'am. I have a quick question for you. Over the last, well, first of all, back up to that point in Maryland, we cannot add commission to the contract from our buyer. So that's a big no-no. But as far, I mean, on the offer to the seller, we can't get into that. But on the other part, I was going to say is... Can you hear me? Yeah. You cannot include your compensation as a buyer's agent in the offer from the buyer to the seller. Is it a state rule? Is it a local MLS rule? It's a state rule. Okay. Yeah. So that's something you have to kind of tackle and try to figure that out. There are ways around it, but you can't specifically state it. Okay. So anyway, over the last two years, my business has been predominantly death, divorce, downsizing, and transfers since the interest rates started going up. When do you... I'm thinking we still have another two years of that till the pain point gets to where the sellers that are in the house with the lower interest rates are willing to give that up. Do you see anything different than that? Yeah. Than what? They're being a long time before they decide to sell? Yeah. Because like I said, most of my business this year was death, divorce, downsizing, and transfers for my listings. Yeah. Ones that had to. It wasn't a choice. Yeah. That's the only people doing deals right now, people that have to. So your question is, how long do I think it's going to be before the trade-up sellers start selling? Yeah. I think they're going to start selling in January. It's going to be a trickle effect because what's happening is, is we've been a year and a half worth of higher rates, longer than that, actually, of higher rates. And so what happens, I mean, the same thing happened back in the 80s and stuff, like people become accustomed to these higher rates. They kind of get used to the fact that rates are going to be higher. We'll see fluctuations, like it was at 8, and then it got down close to 7. It'll probably go back up some, but it's going to hover around here, and people are just going to finally just, see, every day they hate their current home more and more and more. And so it just gets to the point where they're like, okay, screw it, we're just going to go for it. You know, and maybe they get a buy down where they get the rate down into the fives, you know, and they're like, okay, we can swallow this. So I think it's just going to be a trickle. If rates come down quite a bit, we'll see like a big rush. But I think outside of the big rush, if that ever happens, if we ever see like a drop all of a sudden, outside of that, I think it's just going to be a trickle. I don't think we're going to see like this just massive, like, okay, you know, in August, we're just going to see a ton of like trade-up sellers. I just think it's going to be like this trickle that happens, and I think it's going to start in January. I think people are finally, after New Year's, they're going to be like, okay, this is the year. We're going to do this. We're tired of waiting. We can't wait anymore. Our daughter is three now, and two, and we've got to have another room. We can't wait anymore. And so then what happens is the people that used to not be the need-to people now become the need-to people, right? And then rates don't matter as much. So I just think it's going to be a more of a trickle with those. But a nice trickle, not just like a little trickle. It's going to be like a nice flow trickle. Hey, Ricky, outside of the weekly, once you've connected with a remote land. That's all you have to do. It does all the heavy lifting for you. That weekly email does all the heavy lifting for you. You don't have to, I used to try to send Christmas cards, and I would do yearly check-ins with my top 200 clients. I did that for a couple years as I was in the building stages, but then I got to where I was too busy to even do those things and come to find out it didn't matter anyway. They loved when they talked to me the first time. The great first impression I gave them was everything. Then the weekly email kept me in front of them until they decided to buy or sell. Did that process win everyone over? No, no process is going to win everybody over, but it will win a lot of people over, especially if you treat them like family. So it's that family feel every time they communicate with you, that family feel when they call you out of the blue and, you know, 17 months and they just want to know what's sold in their neighborhood or something and you get right back to them. You don't try to sell them. You get them the information. It's just doing those things where they just feel like, man, he just really takes care of me whenever they need something. Just that's what keeps them coming back. It's not necessarily, you know, the closing gifts and the, you know, the check-ins and the stuff like that. One thing I did love to do when I put in my weekly email a lot was I just asked a lot of people to lunch. Like anybody that would be willing to sit down and have lunch with me, I was just, if I could have lunch five days a week with clients and pay for lunch and just sit down and just get to know them better and enjoy some time and, you know, talk about real estate if they wanted to, whatever, the more of those I could do, the better because I'm just deepening those relationships and stuff. So it's like the weekly email should be your foundation, your bread and butter for the nurturing process and that anything you do on top of that is just consider that a bonus. If you do a yearly check-in, if you do a Christmas card, if you do a lunch, whatever the extra little things you do, you know, social media. It's like you make the weekly email, the foundation, sprinkle social media on top, you know, like salt and pepper. Like, you know, the weekly email is the main course and the daily little videos are just kind of like, you know, the extra little toppings that kind of make it a little bit cooler because they're like, oh, I'll get his emails, oh, I'll see him on social. But yeah, that would be literally could be all of it. How did you decide on weekly versus any other? You know what it was? I just listened to my clients. Back in 2007, when I started getting back in the game, I got so many messages from people who wanted a weekly list of foreclosures because foreclosures were big back then. So they wanted this weekly list of foreclosures. So I started sending this weekly list of foreclosures to all these people that asked for it. There were sort of like 10 or 20 people at the time. And I was like, you know what? I'm going to start sending this to everyone in my database, which was like 500 people at the time. I'm going to start sending this to everybody every week. So it started out this weekly report of foreclosures where I was also given some extra market information, doing a little self-promotion, some new listings I was getting and stuff like that. And then over time, as the foreclosures kind of dwindled and went away, I just continued to send it every week and I kind of morphed into this market report. And then I just got better and better and better at it. But it actually originated from back then, and I was just listening to my clients. That's what they wanted. And the rest kind of just fit into place. And I didn't even realize it, but what I was doing was building a brand. I didn't know that that's what I was doing. I was building a brand with the people that get the email. And actually, I was doing social media. You see, email is social media. It's a place that you post original, consistent content to stay in front of people, yada-yada. It's a different platform. It's a different format. But it's the same thing as social media. It's like I didn't even realize that I was doing social media doing the email, that I was building a brand doing the email. I didn't realize all this at the time, but looking back, that's exactly what I was doing. Man, well, I can't thank you enough. I think everybody who's sitting on this call, Ricky, has gotten tremendous value. I mean, I took pages and notes myself. A couple of things I carried away from it were it doesn't matter what you do, just identify your thing, your most efficient thing. Do it efficiently and do a lot of it now to prime your pump to get ready for the next year. And every single people, I've scrolled through the whole Zoom, every single one of you is going to make a million dollars. It's a matter whether you're going to make it in six months, a year, or 10 years. And that road is paved with conversations. And the person that's in charge of that, the exciting news is you. And so I hope that that came through today. Ricky, we can't thank you enough. I know they can connect with you on YouTube. You put the links in there for the Join Ricky. If they want the Red X discount, they search your name on YouTube, right? To find you if they want to sort of follow you and get you on there. What else should they do? Or how else can they stay connected with you? Right here, right here. I forgot about this. You can text me here too. 251-312-8844. And I send out daily little motivational text messages. But that'll also send you the coaching program and all that stuff. And I look at all those replies. I write all those text messages. So you can also hit me up there. But hey, enjoy it, guys. You guys have a good rest of your day. Hope you got something really good out of this. And let me know if there's something I could do to continue helping you guys. Thanks, Ricky. We really appreciate it. See you guys. Appreciate you big time. Thank you. Thank you.