 Now I know a lot of people are calling for a crash, a huge correction, a recession for 2019 and that may be. I think, now let's talk about if the market starts to really turn down and even if it crashes, even if we see a huge correction or a recession and let's say prices go down 10 or 20 percent. What's up everybody? Ricky Caruth here. Remakes of Orange Beach, Zero to Diamond dot com where I'm reducing the failure rate in the real estate industry one agent at a time. What am I excited about for 2019? Well first off, 2018 flew by. It went by so fast. It was almost a blink of an eye but so much happened in 2018. It was an incredible year for me. 2017 was the first year it hit a million dollars and it was like everything just was coming at me and like everything just fell in my lap. I couldn't really keep up with how many deals were coming at me and so that was a good thing. I enjoyed that. I was just my work involved basically processing and just helping people that were approaching me saying I want to do this, I want to do that and so that was a really good year. 2018 ended up with the same exact result but I feel like I worked harder for it. Not as many things fell in my lap. Actually very little things fell in my lap. I really had to be aggressive. I really had to put in the work to find the deals and you know so I put in more work. I really feel like not necessarily more work just different kind of work. It was more of where's the next deal coming from rather than you know how are we going to process all these deals. At the end of the day I enjoy the ebbs and flows. I enjoy the ups and downs of the market and it keeps me on my toes and that's what I like. I like a challenge. I don't like everything being the same. That's kind of why I got into coaching and doing these YouTube videos is because it pushes me. It challenges me. So when my market transactions were down in the amount of Gulf Front condos that were sold and that's my primary market. Our single family homes transactions were up just a little bit but it was still kind of flat and so overall the market did slow down a lot and it was just a different kind of market. Prices did not go up as much as they did in 2017 and you know I had to make adjustments. Maybe January or February I noticed this slowdown happening and I made adjustments and that's what you have to do. You have to pay attention to the market and when transactions slow down or speed up or you know the climate of the buyer's attitudes towards certain things, certain properties and certain price points change, you have to pick up on that and adjust your game plan. This is what most agents don't do. They don't adjust their game plan. They just continue doing the same things and that's why they end up failing or end up just being averaged because they don't adapt and take advantage of the opportunity that's going on in the market. There's always, always an opportunity in the market at all times. So 2019 to me is going to be no different. We're going to go into 2019 and we're going to evaluate okay. January is going to be a great month to see kind of where we are. We just experienced one of the slowest December's that I've ever seen and to me you know maybe it's just me being optimistic but I feel like hopefully that's going to lead to a really busy January. Okay so maybe there's a lot of pent up demand in my market and people are waiting for the first of the year to get out there and to buy something or so on and so forth. I'm really looking to see what happens in January to see if my prediction there is right. Either way it goes I'm going to make adjustments and I'm going to set myself up for the rest of the year. Now I know a lot of people are calling for a crash a huge correction a recession okay for 2019 and that may be okay. I think that no one really knows exactly you know when we're going to get a huge hit you know when we're going to get you know a light correction nobody really knows when these things are going to happen nobody can predict it at all. Anyone that tells you that they know what's fixing to happen they're they're literally trying to sell you something somewhere so be very weary of people that tell you they know what's going to happen okay no one knows what's going to happen so but what we do is is we pay attention and we make adjustments there's always an opportunity so if the market continues to be flat okay we have somewhere close to the same amount of transactions in 2019 as we had in 18 that's great because that tells me that I will have probably a better year than I had in 2018 because 2018 I had to make huge adjustments and if 2019 is the same kind of year I'm not really going to have to make that huge of adjustments as I did from 17 to 18 and I should be able to capitalize and reach my goals. If for some reason the market really picks up and we have another crazy busy year like we did in 2017 then that's kind of a no-brainer I mean I can just sit here and just deals are going to be thrown at me and all I have to do is catch them and process them and close them and just help these people do what they want to do so it's a no-brainer there if the market decides to explode. Now let's talk about if the market starts to really turn down and even if it crashes even if we see a huge correction or a recession and let's say prices go down 10 or 20 percent I don't see that but if it happens here's the game plan we're going to notice it okay we're going to pick that up very early we're going to know that that's what's happening and we're going to make adjustments really early into the process and we're going to literally get on the phones okay when the market starts to turn down that means that there's going to be less activity overall okay and it's going to give you as an agent a lot more time on your hands what are we going to do we're going to fill that time up with talking to people preferably property owners okay these are the highest quality prospects they buy and sell so we're going to call we're just going to continue to circle prospect okay we can call expires and for sale by owners and all that stuff if you want to okay but my bread and butter is the circle prospecting these are people that aren't getting called by other agents and I'm going to simply do the same thing I do when the market's great I'm going to use my script ask them how they're doing see if you know there's anything in the world that I can do to help them okay and we're going to get into a conversation about the market there's no doubt because the market's turning down and we have all this this market data in our head because we're paying attention to the market we know where the market's at in their subdivision they're complex and you know when the market starts to come down if it comes down 10 or 20 percent there's going to be a lot of people that want to buy during this period okay and it's going to be up to us to get out there and find these people these investors that want to buy while the market is down we have to get out there and find these people and help these people purchase these properties okay at the same token there's going to be sellers that have to sell because all of a sudden they're in trouble because you know the market crashed on them we're in a recession they're not making out as much money maybe they get laid off whatever the case may be and they need help getting out of this property okay so there's where our listings are going to come from maybe it's a straight up listing maybe it ends up being a short sale okay back when the market crashed in 2008 between then and 2000 maybe 12 or 13 I did about 50 short sales for clients I have a lot of experience doing short sales and it is a grueling process there's a lot to it but you know it's one of those things that you just got to get in there get your get your hands dirty and get to work and every bank does the short sell process differently so you have to kind of go through the process if the market does crash and short sales do become you know a big part of the market again then I'll do a video on you know kind of the basics of the process of the short sell overall do I see a big crash coming maybe maybe not does it matter absolutely not listen guys business is 100 unlimited regardless of anything okay why is it unlimited it's because the industry is this big and we as agents are not even not even in the you have to have a microscope to see us in size of the market and in the volume of the actual market okay so to me unlimited this means that there's more than we can handle there's no way that you can handle everything that that that you can possibly do and have the time to process okay there's no way in the world there's more than you can handle forever okay now the industry is this big the amount of volume we are this big okay we're a little bitty peon agents in this huge industry okay what if the industry goes down 50 percent okay we're still very small compared to the industry what if it goes down 20 75 percent where it gets down to 25 percent of the current size we're still so small compared to the overall market which tells us that business is unlimited okay closings are happening every single day regardless of anything going on and it's up to us to continue pushing and meeting new people and helping more and more people that's the name of the game so again i'm ricky caruth if you guys haven't met me yet i'm here to make a difference in the real estate industry i want to push this message out there as far as i can so that less agents have to quit the business when the market does finally decide to crash i am coaching thousands of real estate agents for absolutely free there's a free course there's an action plan there's live training twice a month and there's a huge facebook group full of all the members all that can be found at zero two diamond dot com i still answer every email text message and dm on instagram so if you guys need anything whatsoever i'm here for you i got your back and we'll talk to you soon