 This is the greatest opportunity right now for real estate agents to go out there and make a million dollars. I'm going to break all of this down. I'm going to show you market data that will prove to you how solid this really is in terms of a game plan. And I'm going to tell you exactly what you need to be doing to go out there and make that million dollars. And this is mid 2023 right now. We're in the middle of your 2008. And I'm going to explain that in just a second. But even if you're watching this video towards the end of 2023 or even into 2024, 25, 26, whenever you watch this video, all of these principles and everything I'm talking about in this video will still apply. I've been doing this for 21 years now. I built my business up to a million dollars a year. And I did it with exactly what I'm going to share with you today. So get ready because I'm going to break all this down. It's going to be very simple, no overcomplication. And no, there's not going to be any kind of coaching program that I'm going to upsell you to at the end. Everything I do is 100% free. I'm actually the first completely free coach in the real estate industry. My goal is to simply do one thing, reduce the failure rates in the real estate industry one agent at a time. And we're actually accomplishing that. I've been around doing coaching for six years going on seven now. And it's been a roller coaster, but it's been a lot of fun. And I appreciate each and every one of you and I'm here to help. So let's dig into it. First off, I just want to show you my numbers here and this is not to brag. This is simply to give credibility behind what I am saying and to give you encouragement that you can go out here and do the same thing. This is not about me. This is about you. This is about you going out there and accomplishing your dreams and your goals. So, but I just want to show you that I have accomplished mine. And if I can do it, I promise you on everything that you can do it. Here we go. This is a screenshot right out of my local MLS. It's got me there at the top. This is a stretch of eight years from 2014 to 2021. I was the number one agent in terms of volume closed as a single agent. And there's teams on here that I crushed. The next person there is a 20-man team. There's teams here that I crushed during those eight years, not to mention all the single agents. And this is out of every brokers. This is every agent in my county year after year after year. I was number one for eight years in a row. And it was everything that I did during 2008, 2009, 2010 to prepare for the market resurgence. So, let's dig into that. This is actually a just an illustration. This is definitely not exact, but this just gives you an illustration, something visual to look at here that shows you my business in 2008. And it just kind of, you know, I was just kind of treading water there for 2008, 9, 10, 11. But then in 2012, it picked up a little bit by 2014 at like nearly doubled or tripled. And by 2014, I was closing 100 properties a year. That was the first year I did 100 deals as a single agent. I did 100 deals every year since 2014. And it was because of what I did back in 2008 to take advantage and really expand my market share. I'm going to get into all this. But if you think about the activities that I did between 2008, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, nothing changed. I didn't do anything different in 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 12, 13, 14. I didn't do anything different. What happened was is I built a snowball. I continued to build the snowball. And when the market rebounded and resurged, my market, my business exploded with the market. And that's what I want you to understand here is that if you can take advantage of what's happening right now in the market and be prepared for that resurgence, your business is going to explode. And back in 2008, the rebound happened really slow. It took it from 2008, really to 2012 for prices to start coming back up. That's not going to happen like that this time. We're already seeing prices going up over the last 60 days. I'll show you right here. This is medium home prices in America. We started out the year about 350. It was still coming down from last year. But as you see every year, it's kind of trickling down. In 2022, it was trickling down. Even back in 2021, the year of the boom, it actually trickled down a little bit there. And it levels out about the same time as you can see every year. Then it rebounds and starts coming back up. But look at where we are. We're at $376,000 on a medium price. And this is Redfin data that's very up-to-date. It goes back. It gets you to about two weeks before, whereas K. Schiller, Realtor.com, National Association of Realtors, Mortgage Bankers Association, all those places, they're like a one to two, even sometimes three-month lag on their real estate data. Redfin's very up-to-date. They get all their data from the MLS. And so we were at 350. And now we're at 376. We are positive on the year from January 1st. Now, we're not positive year over year. As you can see, we're below 2022. But guess what? Look at this wall right here that 2022 put up as prices dipped in June last year. I was thinking this line was going to continue right through and cross the black line in June and go positive year over year. But it's already inching up. It's trying to get there now. We may go positive year over year sometime in July, if not for sure early June. I would imagine we're going to go positive year over year. And then what are all the crash brothers going to say? And by the way, a true crash is a true crash because it scared everybody. It caught everybody off guard. There's panic out there. And that's something that you just can't predict. It comes from something that's totally unpredictable that throws everything off track and out of whack. The people that try to predict crashes, you know, the 2008 one, there were a few people that predicted that one. But, you know, for those smart people that were looking at those that happen to be looking at those metrics, they did a good job. But right here, it's really hard to say we're going to have a pricing crash. Now, prices are going up. Even Kevin Barber Cochran here from Shark Tank, she said she wants a bloodbath that's coming for the real estate sector, for this real estate sector. What she's talking about is commercial, which I agree with her. And I'm looking to pick those deals up. I'm buying a lot of single family homes right now, but I'm just waiting on commercial to come down a little bit so I can pick up some nice commercial properties. But she says in this article, residential could see a rebound. And if you read this little part of the article here, and down at the bottom, she said everybody's afraid of high rates right now. It's hard to really find a house because of inventory. But the minute those interest rates come down, all hell is going to break loose. And prices are going to go through the roof. Well, you can see on our last slide here that they're already pretty much through the roof. We're almost caught up to 2022 and we're about to go beyond. And this is national. You can look into your local, go to Redfin and look at your local data. You're going to see the same thing. Prices aren't going down, guys. They're going up. Why do you think I'm buying houses? Right? And in the midst of all this with prices going up, okay, we've got realtors leaving the business. Okay, look at this. We're down 60,000. Now look at every year. Every year we have a wave. And I think that's because January 1st, you know, we get caught up on people who aren't paying their dues. And we see that drop off. And then it rebounds and then drop off and then rebound and then drop off and then rebound. I think we see that through the year in different months that there's different dues that are owed and people that aren't paying. I think that's what that wave is. But we lost 60,000 agents. That's a net number. We've probably lost around 80,000, I would think overall. Probably had about 20,000, something like that. Join. We don't know those net numbers or not. We don't know the overall numbers. We know the net numbers. We're down about 60,000 agents. But why are agents leaving the business when in fact real estate prices are going up and real estate seems to be doing extremely well? Well, it's because of this. Last month, we did the, you know, NAR came out with their, you know, existing home sales data and it showed 4.2 million transactions on an annualized basis. Right? We're on track right now to do 4.2 million transactions right now. That number is wildly low. Why is that wildly low? Well, if you go back to 2008, right here, you'll see that in 2008, we did 4.1 transactions. We're not too far away. It's actually 4.12. We're not too far away at all from the 2008 number in terms of number of transactions. That's wild. And so that's why I'm trying to tell you right now that this is your 2008 that you need to take full advantage of because you could not only be the next Ricky Careuth. You could be the next 10X of Ricky Careuth with today's technology and what you can do and the damage you can do in the market in terms of expanding your name and your brand, you could be so far ahead of anything that I have accomplished. It's not even funny. But look at what happened here. It was kind of a slow creep back to 5 million. By 2013, we hit 5 million again. Then we were around 5 million again. Then it kind of got to 5.5 by 2017. We had that incredible year in 2021 of 6.2. That didn't really compete with the 2005 7 million transactions. That was a heck of a year, huh? But what I'm trying to say is that we are at 4.28 million right now. If the year ends up on the same track that we are right now, I think it'll pick up some because I think rates are going to come down. We're going to have a wave of buyers and then we're going to have a pick up. But the problem's going to be, I'll show you in a minute. But we had a slow recovery here. That's not what's going to happen this time. And listen, right now it's better than 2008 because the difference is prices, right? Prices aren't down 50% like they were in 2008. Prices have held solid and they're going up. So if we have about the same amount of transactions as 2008, why are prices staying where they are? Why are prices not dropping even at all? You know, why are they continuing to go up? Well, it's because of this right here. Total housing inventory, the number of homes for sale. If you go back to the 1980s, you'll see that we stayed between that 2 and 3 million mark in terms of number of homes for sale at any given time, the entire decade, between 2 and 3 million homes. And then through the 90s, we stayed around that 2 to 3 million mark. And then boom, it shot up during the housing boom right before the Great Recession in 2008. Around that mark, we had 4 million active homes on the market. And then after that, inventory dwindled and it just continued to dwindle all the way to where we are now, which a report came out. We've got around 550,000 active, 550,000 active homes for sale in the US. And so comparing that to the 80s, when we had 2 to 3 million, we have 500,000 homes right now. And that's why, ladies and gentlemen, that prices are not going down. And if we look right here at the Redfin data with active listings, we can see this shows right here that we are negative 0.86 year over year from 2022. And you can see at this point in the year, we were lower than 2021. And now we just went lower than 2022. So guess what, ladies and gentlemen, for May or June, we are the lowest. And this data was actually for May, up to May 21, which was the day I turned 42 years old. Up to that day, we hit the lowest amount of active homes for sale that we've ever seen in history, all right? You know, since before, you know, long before the 80s. Now, if you look at 2022, we can see that we dipped even lower earlier in the year. So we did get lower than this, but not in June. When it comes to June, we're the lowest that we've ever been. We'll see what happens the rest of the year. We'll see what happens going into 2024. But right now, we are at the lowest that we've ever been in history. And a lot of the problem is people are locked into rates. We see a problem for the housing market. People won't quit their cheap mortgages. Fewer homes are available because homeowners are hanging on to their 3% and 4% interest rates. We can see right here that at the end of 2022, 62% of mortgage holders had a rate below 4%. 82 had a rate below 5%. 92% had a rate below 6%. And so the people that are hanging on to the rates, it's doing two things, okay? It's hurting supply, it's hurting inventory, but it's also building demand because you've got these people, these homeowners who are in their homes and they're dying to upgrade, but they just don't feel like they can or maybe they just can't because they can't afford the higher rates or they don't want to pay the higher rates. So they're basically forced to live in the house that they're at, even though they might not like it, even though they might need a bigger house, they're just not in the position to, they want to wait till rates come down. Well, that demand is brewing every single day. Not to mention that millennials, Zonda did a study, 98% of millennials want to become a homeowner if they aren't already because they want to build their equity instead of someone else's. And so the average age of a first-time home buyer is between 33 and 36. It was 33 in 2021 and it was 36 last year. So between 33 and 36. So if you go back 50 years worth of birth rates, you see in 1990, 33 years ago, that we had a massive spike in births and that massive spike holds true for a good decade and a half. We've got a good decade and a half right now of 33-year-olds coming into the market. And not only after 15 years from now, on the 16th year, you still got people that are turning 34 and 35 and 36 and 37. So this is going to continue. We have more demand. If you see the birth rates before 1990, how low they were compared to where they are now, we're sitting in a position where we don't even understand how much demand that we have from existing homeowners who want to move but can't or won't. We've got more 33-year-olds who are the first time home buyers entering the market than we've seen in decades. And you also have immigrants coming into the country and they need a place to live. They can buy houses. There's no law that says they can't buy houses or rent. And even the ones who are renting, that still affects home prices because the higher the rents are, the more investors are willing to pay for homes. So this is all tied together and it is a just no-brainer when it comes to, okay, where a home price is going to go. Yeah, transactions could do something, mortgage rates could do something. There's some factors there, even if unemployment. And if we see negative GDP, but the fact is that home prices hold steady. We can see right here, this is through recessions, right? The shaded areas are recessions and this is home prices. And you can see they just keep going up through the recession. They keep going up. 2008 is the only time they went down. They just keep going up, right? And this is the most interesting slide on the entire presentation here. This is the percentage of appreciation going back to 1942. And you see the green is positive appreciation years and the red is negative. What does this chart tell you? Back in the mid-40s, we had five years of double-digit appreciation. Everybody said what goes up must come down. Home prices got to come down. They didn't. They held firm. They never went negative. Okay, you fast forward to the mid to the late 70s. We had six years of great appreciation. Four of those were double-digit. And everybody said what goes up must come down. This is, by the way, when rates went up to 18-19% that everybody talks about, that tries to scare you to death about. Okay, the year after that, 1980, it didn't go down. It went 7%. Then it was 5%. Then a flat year at 1%. Then 5, 5, 7, 10, 8, 7. Okay, what goes up must come down. Not home prices. Not home prices. We had a negative 1% over the course of two years, 1990 and 1991. Then you come to the early 2000s. We had four double-digit or positive appreciation years leading up to the great recession, where the mortgage meltdown took us down. And we had those years of negative appreciation that one time because of that. And here recently, 2020 and 21, we saw two years of double-digit appreciation. Neither one were records. And everybody's saying what goes up must come down. No, we had 6% last year. And this year, as I showed you, we're up from 350 to 376, with nothing in sight of home prices going down. Now, if something comes out of nowhere, a world war, another pandemic, you know, something crazy that's blindsided and something weird happens, I still don't think home prices are going down. Okay? But I'm not saying it can't happen. Anything can happen. Anybody that tries to predict or tell you they know what's going to happen, they're just trying to sell you something. The fact is, is that no one knows. But I can show you these charts and I can say, this is what I think. But this chart's very interesting, right? So we know this. We know that the market always surges back 110% of the time. That's what we know for a fact every single time. And we're at 4.28 million transactions. To go from 4.28 to get back to the 5 and the 5.5 is going to be voracious. It's going to be unlike anything that you ever seen. Barbara Cochran said it, that prices are going to go through the roof when mortgage rates come back down and she's right. There's so much pent-up demand of homeowners of 33-year-olds. It's ridiculous. And we know that closings will happen by the truck loads every day for the rest of your life, regardless of market conditions. We learned that a long time ago in 2008 when closings never stopped. So you have job security forever if you do what you're supposed to do and get out there and help people buy and sell and don't lay down with the market. When the market lays down, don't lay down with it. Stay up. Keep moving. Keep grinding. Keep calling. Keep trying to help people because there are people that need help. And if you can squeeze through in the down times, like the agents right now who are doing, you know, they're getting by. They're selling two or three properties a month. They were selling eight to 10. Now they're selling two to three and they're getting by and they're saying, oh man, you know, this market sucks and all that. I'm like, bro, if you can make it during this market, you can make it during any market. You are good. And if you keep going like you're going, when the market resurges, your business is going to explode. It's going to be double what it was before the downturn. I promise you. But if you lay down and you quit, then you're not going to be there. So there's that to think about. The next thing is, there was an agent that he's doing, he did about 10 million so far this year. He said, Ricky, how do I get to 30 million or 35 million? Whatever he wanted to do. And I said, number one, quit trying to get to 35 million. That's the first step is quit thinking about 35 million. Make the goal, look at the goal, but don't put so much weight on the goal. You can't control it. I said, if you did the same thing you did in 2021 and 22 and 23 and the market kept going and from 2021 it kept going the same as it was into 2022 into 2023. Would you be selling 50 million this year? He said, hmm, yep, I sure would. I said, but you're not doing anything different. Your activities aren't different. You're not doing anything different. You're doing the same stuff. It was just the market that came back and made your business explode, right? Right. So you can't control the fact that the market took a downturn. You can't control that. So if you can't control it, why are we going to put so much weight on the goal at the end of the year? Put more weight on how many people can I help today? How many people can I talk to and ask them what in the world I could do to help them buying and selling real estate? When you woke up January 1, 2020, I bet you were like, oh, new decade. Let's get after it. And March rolls around and boom, there's a pandemic. I guess you weren't expecting that one. I guess you didn't figure that into your business plan? No. You didn't put into your business plan in March of 2022 that interest rates were going to start going up and that things were going to start slowing down a little bit, were you? No. In 2023, you probably realized that we're in a slower market than we were in 2022, but you didn't put in your business plan that by the end of the year rates are going to come down and we're going to have this explosion of buyers and end up the year amazingly strong, probably catch up to what you wanted to do and end up 2024 off like a rocket. You can't control all this stuff. You have to take it day by day and do what you can do every day and max out. And I don't have a $10,000 program I can sell you to solve all your problems. See, that's the beauty of being a free coach. I want to tell you exactly what I think. So what do we have to do to go out there and make a million dollars? We have to do exactly what I did and that is this, market share. Increase your market share. Market share is simply this, the percentage of people in the market who know and never forget you, period, end of story. It's not how many listings you have, not how many closings you've had compared to the rest of the market. That's a piece of the puzzle, but it's not it's not where I live in terms of building my business. I live in a world where everyone needs to know who I am, what I'm about, that I'm here to help and never forget who I am. That's what market share is. So how are we going to increase our market share? We've got our three buckets here. We've got lead generation, follow up, and nurture. That's it. All of the how to write contracts and how to work MLS and set up CRMs and search and properties and showing etiquette and all that stuff, you're going to learn all that stuff in the field as you go. I'm not here to teach you all that. I've got tips and tricks every single day on Instagram and my videos, all kinds of little details that if you go there and follow me, you're going to get all that kind of stuff. You can also reach out to me if there's anything I can do to help. I'm happy to give my two cents on any of your situations, but I'm here to give you the overview of what it takes to build a million dollar a year business. That's it. Period end of story. So we've got the three buckets, follow up, lead gen, follow up, and nurture. Lead gen, okay? Everything works. Again, I'm not trying to sell you my coaching program. Everything works. I'm not going to tell you that not to do social media, not to do cold callings, not to do open houses, networking, sphere of influence. Whatever you do is fine with me. The fact is, is that you got to figure out what works best for you and then go all in on whatever that is. If a Zillow leads, great. Do the Zillow leads. I don't care what your lead gen is. I just need you to be in a position where you've got something that works best for you and produces enough people in the market. Remember market share, how many people in the market know and never forget you. I need whatever your lead gen is to produce enough people that you're creating a big enough brand quick enough, right? Which means you need to be talking to and creating at least five new friends a day, which for me, if I'm cold calling, I'm probably going to, you know, talk to 10 people to create those five new friends, which means I probably made 100 dials. I got a 10% pickup rate, 100 dials. I'm going to talk to 10 people. I'm going to make five new friends out of that call session that takes me an hour, okay? That's all I need to do to build a million-dollar year of business. That's most of it right there. That's most of it. But again, lead gen, what works for you? Great. I can tell you what works for me. And in this tight market, where there's no listings, we've got to be smarter and we have to stack our listings. The name of the game right now is Stack Listings to the Moon. If, you know, I'd love to see you guys taking overpriced listings, honestly, overpriced because if you don't, another agent will, and then they're going to sell it. Take the overpriced listing. Prices are going up and the market will catch up or the seller will come down. But relationships over transactions is the key. You take overpriced listing, that's fine. It's not about the sale. It's about creating the lifelong relationship with that seller. I'm looking at sphere. I'm looking at absentee owners. I can tell you how to get those. For sell-buy owners, are normally not at the top of my list, but they are in this market. Because it's so tight, they've raised their hand and said they'll sell. I've got an agent with 26 for sell-buy owner listings. He's closed in five a month. New and old expireds, gold. We're finding gold is anywhere between six months and a year back. I've got an agent that just put one under contract in Georgia for $3.6 million. She sold 500 acres to the state of Georgia. Off an expired listing, she called and said, hey, you want to put it back on? They said, yep. Boom. This is not rocket science, ladies and gentlemen. But again, I'm not big on social media for real estate in terms of Lee Jinn. I like it for brand building, but everybody's got their own thing. Get out there and figure out what your thing is. You can get a discount here to get expireds, geoledes, absentee owners for sell-buy owners at redxdiscount.com, but I did a full demo on this a couple days ago. I'm going to put a link in the description of the video right now where I show you screen share, how to get the absentee owners, how to go back 10 years worth of expires with drones and cancels in your market. You get the email addresses, the cell phone numbers, everything. Call, text, email, and hit them on social media. That's what you guys need to be doing. I mean, every Lee Jinn source leads right back to the same thing, talking to somebody and creating a relationship and helping them buy or sell. So why are we doing all in my world? I'm thinking I'm a get it done kind of person. Why am I just going to do all this stuff to just come right back to talking to people when I could just get redx and just call them? It's really that simple. And if you use my scripts, we're not calling them to sell them. We're just calling to get to know them and see what it is we can do to help them. So use my scripts. You can download them in the description or you can go to rcscripts.com. That's rickiekeruthscripts.com, rcscripts.com. Okay, nurture. Okay, nurture. We're going to nurture them with the weekly email. If you want to see all my weekly emails going back to last November and just steal my template, I'll put a link in the description or just go to startmyweeklyemail.com. I made this really easy for you. Now you can scale your business. Here's a screenshot of some of my most recent emails. You can see I'm sending out to 29,000. 10,000 of those are bouncing and 75 hundred or so are open to get every single week. And I sell 100 properties a year right off that email. You can build the same snowball in your business. Now, the daily goal is going to be to create five new friends a day with property owners in the market. Okay? Over five years, that's going to equal 6,000 property owners that you created friendships with in the market. Okay? If you create that weekly email to your entire database on the same day of the week forever, to those 6,000 people plus whoever organically came into your database, how big is your business? You're making a million dollars a year. Okay? You're going to watch your MLS hot sheet every day. New listings, pendings, clothes, expires, all that stuff. Stay on top of that. Every day, you're going to be a market expert within a week or two. And then you continue looking at it to stay on top of the market. It's going to create so many opportunities for you, just knowing that information. We're going to make our calls from 9 to 12 every day. And you're going to do social media and all your other marketing stuff and your handwritten letters and, you know, your weekly email and all that after lunch. I've made this really extremely simple for you. Okay? If you want to do one deal a week, you need 15 to 20 active buyers and sellers at all times. If you want to do two deals a week like I have eight years in a row, you're going to do what I did. You're going to have 25 active buyers and sellers at all times. You're going to close 1% of your database a year with no prospecting. So, once you build that database up to, say, 10,000 people, you're going to be closing 100 deals a year off of that weekly email with nothing else going on. Isn't that what you want? A residual business where deals just fall in your lap. If you prospect your heart out for a few years, you'll get to the top of the mountain where you don't have to prospect anymore. That is the goal. The longer you push that out, the more you try to run away from making calls, the further and further that day is that you don't have to prospect is from you. Get there as quickly as possible, guys, so you can walk away from prospecting. Still make the million dollars a year with very little effort because these people are calling you and not dealing with any other agents. They want you and then you can go spend the time used to prospect to build other businesses, buy real estate, whatever it is you want to do, spend more time with the family. That is the dream, ladies and gentlemen. So, again, here's my business. I just took you through exactly what I did to build the snowball up to the point. It wasn't necessarily what I was doing. I was collecting emails. I was gathering data. I was sending weekly emails. Yes, I was building the snowball, but I didn't do much different. Anything different, activity-wise, any of these years, it was the resurgence of the market. And we're going to see a resurgence in the next 12 months. This is the moment right here. It's not after the resurgence happens to take advantage of it. It's before. And that's now because this one's going to happen a lot faster. Now, the power of four is this. Every time I go out there and tell a group of people, no matter how many thousands it is, here's what you need to do. Now, go do it. The next week, I get together with them and say, okay, how many of you actually accomplished this and went out here and did that? You know how many actually said that they did it? Four. Every single time. I don't care if I'm talking to four, 10, 100, 1,000, whatever. Four people said, yeah, I went out and read the book or did the fitness challenge or made my calls or whatever it was. So, my question to you is, are you going to be one of the four that go out there and take this information and do something special over the next decade? Because that's what it's going to take. So, there you go, guys. I gave you the blueprint from top to bottom. I hope you enjoyed it. You know, this is just my thoughts on the market. I really, I hope you can tell, I just really want to help you in your business. So, if there's something else I can do, feel free to shoot a comment. You know, message me on Instagram, whatever it is. Reach out to me. Let me know what it is so that I can help you and outside of that. Keep going. This is your year. This is your 2008. I don't want to see you shine. See you in the next video.