 Okay, you read that and here's the new agent. You think, oh my gosh, you know, there's no way I can make it in this market. There's too many agents. There's not enough transactions. How many people are working with buyers right now? Mostly. Okay. Big problem, right? Serious problem. Because the thing is, is we're in a seller's market and every buyer that you represent is competing against five, 10, 15 other buyers, right? Think about this. You've got agents who are working with buyers and they're saying, Ricky, how do I get my buyers offers accepted? We're competing against 10 other offers. And I'm like, well, like step one, let's represent the seller in that scenario. Let's be the agent on the other side of this equation that is looking at the 10 offers to decide which one we want to accept. Not one of the 10 buyers who only has a one in 10 chance of actually getting a deal done, right? So just look at it from like a bird's eye view. Look at the industry. Okay, right now we're in a seller's market. However, there's a lot of agents strictly working with buyers. Why, right? Why? I haven't figured that out yet. And what's so funny is the agents who are working with a lot of buyers, what I keep hearing from them is that they're working to try to figure out how to do short sales so that when the market turns and all these pre-foreclosers and short sales come around, they're going to be ready for it. These agents are like going to the place in the market that's really the toughest. For me, like I want to work with just sellers right now if I can. I'm representing some buyers, but I've always been more listing, not listing focus, I've been a more property owner focused, right? Property owners are your best buyers. If you focus all your efforts on property owners, you'll have plenty of buyers, trust me. I mean, people sell and then buy and they refer buyers to you and you get buyer leads from just having the listings. Like you get plenty of buyers. We don't need to go get buyer leads. We'll have plenty of buyer leads if we work on developing relationships with property owners. But what I'm getting at is I want you guys to try to understand the dynamics here. Stop going after buyers in a seller's market and then don't turn around and go after sellers in a buyer's market. You're just making everything 10 times harder on yourself. When the market flips, I'm going to represent more buyers, right? So right now every buyer, every seller is basically saying, okay, which one of you 15 buyers want it? Okay. And when the market flips, every buyer is going to be saying, okay, which one of you 15 sellers are going to have the lowest price for me? You see what I'm saying? It's going to be the same thing, just opposite. And I want to be on the, I want to be on the side of that equation. This is where efficiency comes in. I'm all about being efficient and scalable, right? And doing things that basically produce more and less time. Let's just think about it like that, right? We want to produce more and less time. There's an unlimited amount of things to do. There's an unlimited amount of ways to build your business. There's an unlimited different avenues to get leads and things to do and all that stuff, right? And you may be sitting here looking at what you do on a daily basis and you may be saying to yourself, okay, I'm doing all I can do as a new agent, and here's my routine. And I look at your routine and I'm like, absolutely not scratch all that stuff because you're thinking because you're newer or because you don't know stuff or whatever. You feel like you have to go through these beginning stages of routines of things that maybe top producers don't do because you got to put in your time and pave your own way and stuff. And I'm here to tell you, let's go straight to the meat of the bone and do what's most efficient all the time. Let's not just do some stuff that's productive sometimes. Let's just spend all of our time on the most productive stuff. You can't do all the deals ever. If the market crashes tomorrow, say it goes down 90%, that 10% that's left is still enough for you to do as many deals as you can possibly handle every single month. You can't do all the deal. I don't care if it goes down 90%, there's still more business than that 10% for each and every one of you to do as much as you can handle. What does that tell you? That you never have to worry about a market crashing. As soon as you start to think that the market has something to do with your success or competition has something to do with your success or any of these outside factors have anything whatsoever to do with your success, that's the moment that you are really holding yourself back and you're kind of putting yourself in that loser category, right? You can come out of it, but for the moment, you're thinking loser thoughts. You're thinking loser mentality thoughts. You gotta rise above your own mind and realize that none of that has anything to do with how many deals you're gonna close. Like I say, if the market crashes tomorrow it goes down 90% transactions. We only have 10% of the same amount of transactions. Nar just came out and said, there's more agents than there are listings. No, okay, you read that and here's the new agent. You think, oh my gosh, you know, there's no way I can make it in this market. There's too many agents, there's not enough transactions, but that is just a second. That is like a window of time that's probably no longer than a second in the market. Those listings sold yesterday, now what? There's another batch of listings today. There's another batch tomorrow. There's another batch tomorrow. It's never ending. And the fact that there's all these agents out there means nothing because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how many people in your market know who you are and like you. And once you make that great first impression with them one-on-one, what is your mechanism to stay in touch with them forever where they never forget who you are? Because once they get that feeling that you really care about them and you wanna work hard and then you follow up with something that puts them in a position where they never forget who you are, then they just never forget who you are. And you have a really good chance to be their agent. And if you do that across thousands of people in your market, you win. So like effort per transaction right now is at an all-time high. Effort per close deal, all-time high, especially for new agents. Like for me, I'm all past kinds of referrals. My business just clicks along like nothing's going on. People still trying to build their business and get out there and beat the bushes and build their database and stuff. They're having a rough time in terms of effort per transaction and that's holding a lot of people back because they're like, well man, I gotta put in all this work and I haven't even done a deal or only did one deal or whatever. And that can be tough. I had a question to overcome. You made a comment about focusing on listings because it's a seller's market. And I think one of the obstacles to overcome is people want to sell. They know that it's the height of the market but they don't have a place to go to. How would you come to that conversation? I would say, cool. When the market turns around, do you have an agent that you're gonna work with? So what I wanna do with those kind of clients because those aren't clients today. And this is another problem with agents. You're taking every single client and trying to figure out how to close them today, right? When that client there is not really worth spending a lot of time on right now. Have the conversation, spend time with them. Go have lunch with them, like hang out with them. I'm not saying don't spend time with them. I'm saying that those clients are more than likely gonna be buyers and sellers later when the market changes, right? Because that is a fact. There's nothing to buy. There's nothing to replace what they have. So what are you gonna do? Why would I tell my clients, hey, yeah, let's put your house up. Let's get 15 offers for then you to go be one of the 15 offers on another house, to have a one and 15 chance to win the bid and have to pay an ungodful amount over asking price. Why would I even want them to be in that position? No, my advice would be this, let's wait. This is not gonna last forever. Let's give it some time and let the market cool off a little bit. Here's the punchline. If you're selling to buy, it doesn't matter when you do it because whatever you're selling, if it goes down, that's okay because whatever you're buying is gonna go down. If you wait later because you're waiting, if you're gonna wait the market out so you can get more for your house, then you're gonna be in the same boat because whatever you're buying is gonna go up as well. And so the only way that that works is this, okay? And if you really want to hit a home run with it in that situation is if they have a place that they can live in the meantime, right? Or they have something they can rent or a family or this or that and they can sell their house for an ungodful amount now and then wait, rent for a couple of years, stay somewhere, whatever, for a couple of years or how long it takes, maybe six months, maybe a year, maybe two, maybe three, maybe four. I don't know.