 So, today we have some predictions on when mortgage rates might go back down. Rates just recently hit 7% and crushed the opportunity for many buyers to actually buy a home with mortgage payments going up over $1,000 from this time last year. Now, since rates have been coming up, prices have been coming down. We hit a peak average price in the country of $413,000 back in June, and here recently in September the numbers showed $385,000 was the average price of a house. So even though prices are down from the peak of June, we're still up year over year in September over 8%. So prices are still higher than they were last year, and the National Association of Neurologyers is predicting that we're going to have around 4.7 million transactions this year, compared to the 6.1 million transactions we had last year. And just to put that into perspective, pre-pandemic 2019, we had around 5.1 million transactions. So we are lower than we were back in 2019, but prices are still ridiculously higher than 2019. And if we compare all this to 2008 and what happened back then from actually 2006 to 2012, there's so many differences in that economy versus this economy, which we could get into, but that would be a whole other video, and I've touched on it in past videos. But just to compare then and now, right now we're down 7% from the peak prices, then and from 2006 to 2012, we went down a total of 27%. So we have a long way to go before we get to the point of prices being down as much as they were back then. But what we have seen, and I just posted a video about this the other day, is that prices are decreasing at a faster rate than they did back in 2006. And if you want to know why prices are going down faster now than in 2006, I'll link that video below if you didn't catch it. The first prediction comes from Lawrence Young. He's with the National Association of Realtors, he's the chief economist, and he says this. Even with the Federal Reserve raising its short-term Fed funds rate by another large amount, long-term interest rates look to move only slightly. The mortgage market has already priced in the latest Fed move. So what he's saying is, he doesn't think mortgage rates are going to get affected that much by this latest rate hike by the Fed. He goes on to say, still mortgage rates are near 20-year highs and that hurts home buyers. Once inflation is contained, mortgage rates will start to drift lower. It may be another year or two before that happens. So what Lawrence Young is saying is that it's going to be a year or two guys, so buckle up and get ready and sit tight because we're going to be here a while. Now I'll give you another prediction in a minute, but let's just sit on this for a second and talk about how that could affect us. Real estate agents or real estate investors, one thing you have to understand is that when rates go up, every time rates take a hike, mortgage rates, it shocks the market because it pushes buyers out of the ballgame. But when this shock happens, when interest rates come up, it's very temporary where everybody kind of takes a step back and it takes about a week or two to allow the market to normalize and then we're in this new market where everybody kind of gets used to the fact that we're at higher interest rates, prices come down a little to compensate and we're back to rock and roll. And now a lot less transaction, sure, what do we have to do? We have to go out and put in twice as much effort. So here's a couple of tips of some things you can do if you're a real estate agent and or real estate investor, right? Go out there and double down on the things that have been working in your business and get rid of the things that aren't working and haven't been working. Like for example, if you're making a lot of calls, cold calls, that's been working for you and you've been doing a lot of open houses that really haven't been producing that much, double down on the cold calls, get rid of the open houses. That's just an example, hypothetical situation. If creating content and creating tons of organic leads online through Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, you know, TikTok, all the different platforms, if that's your thing, if it's been working really well and you've been cold calling but the social media is working better than on the cold calling, get rid of the cold calling, double down on your social media stuff. The point is is that you're going to have to double down on what's been working, put twice as much effort in to get the same amount of leads as you were getting before, right? And the only way to double down on what's been working is to get rid of what's not been working. If you're a real estate investor, listen, it just takes some time to settle out. You know, when we're in the middle of these shocks, we don't really know what prices are because we don't know what prices are going to come down and level out at these new rates and then we don't know what the next interest rate hike is going to involve and what that's going to do to prices. So we're in a very volatile market when it comes to real estate investing. If you're investing for long term, you're just looking at cash flow anyway. So if the deal makes sense in today's high interest rate world with the cash flow, then it's probably a good deal that you can do and refinance later when rates come back down. If you're buying short term to buy and flip, you want to be buying things so cheap, ridiculously cheap. So I flip a lot of houses and we've been turning down deals left and right that we would have been buying left and right, you know, back earlier this year. So you have to be incredibly picky right now on your flips. Another prediction was by Red Fed. They said here that last month that the housing market was going to get a lot worse. And they were going to see increases in mortgage rates likely to continue to mid 2023. So they're saying the REITs are going to pay peak out around mid 2023. Listen, all this is really just predictions. We know that rates are going to continue to go up somewhere through 2023. They're going to level off. And then as inflation comes back down and normalizes to the numbers that they want to see, then rates will start to come back down. I think Lawrence Young has it on the money here that it's going to take a year or two to really go through this entire process. Will rates go up the whole year or two? No, they're going to go up to a certain point and then they're going to stop. They're going to kind of stay there for a while. And that's going to take a minute for them to start drifting back down. What we need to realize as agents and investors is that the market normalizes each time only within a couple weeks, a month at the most, and we're back to this normal where we know what prices are. And we kind of know what direction to go and we know how to consult, we know how to advise our clients, we know how to make offers on properties. As we're chasing the market down as prices continue to go down, we need to be thinking, Hey, the comps that of a house that just closed three weeks ago, that is old news. Because it was on the market 90 days ago, went under contract, 60 days ago, and then it closed 30 days after that. That was when rates were lower, and that was a completely different market. So it's hard to look at comps and say, this is what it is. We need to look at comps and say, this is what it was. Okay, I hope you enjoyed this video, got a lot of tips out of it. If you would, please click that subscribe button. If you haven't already, click the like button. If you haven't already, and please let me know what in the world that I can do for you. We'll see you guys on the next video. Let's go.