One of my good friends told me about this incredible strategy that she's using with her buyers.

One thing that happens with buyers is when they come in, we tend to walk them through a conversation that has to deal with criteria. We qualify 'em of course, and we start talking about criteria.

And for instance, when we talk about criteria, here's an example of what we might say, "Well, what are you looking for? Are you looking for a three bedroom, two bath? How much square feet, what area of town?" And then ultimately we get to, "and what price range are you in?" And how did you arrive at that price range?"

We always come down to the price range.

Then they got prequalified with the lender, whatever, and then we try to fit round pegs and square holes.

So we look into the market and start telling the client about why they can't afford to be where they want or why they're gonna have to adjust their budget.

That's a hard conversation to have. And...

Here is a crazy stat that will be interesting for your sellers when you're sitting down to talk about a listing:

84% of the properties coming on the market are selling in less than 30 days across the country.

Now I would encourage you to dive deeper into your own local MLS and see what the number is for your local MLS. But it's probably gonna be somewhere in that neighborhood.

Now, another inverse number to that is what percentage of properties are staying on the market longer than six months? When you go back to 2011, that number would've been about 35%. Today, it’s 2%.

2% listings coming in the market are staying on for longer than six months.

You can just see how the market is so strong right now for sellers and how it's such an advantage to put your home on the market today as a seller.

Another great number to pair with these numbers is the fact that on average sellers are receiving 4.8 offers per listing. That's coming on the...

Part of what we should be doing with our clients, especially our buyer clients, is educating them about the reality of the market.

Here's one example of that:

Did you know that right now in America, 48% of buyers are offering above list price by about 2.9%? So when we look at that on the average purchase price in America, which is about $357,000, it's roughly $10,000.

So 48% of the buyers in the market are offering over full price. That number being an average of $10,000.

Now that's an interesting bit of education we can share with buyers to help them understand what they're dealing with when they're out there in the marketplace.

Then you can pair that with another important piece of data, which is:

On average, buyers are gonna compete on a listing 68% of the time.

68% of the time buyers are gonna be competing with another buyer in the marketplace. Because of that, they've gotta be super competitive when they're bringing that offer in. And...

Here's a shocking number:

For every listing in America right now, on average, those sellers, when the listing goes live, are getting 4.8 offers. Let's call it five offers per listing.

It's truly one of the best times in history to put a home on the market, but will this be changing soon?

The answer is yes.

What will change this dynamic is a buyer's ability to afford the house. And what's impacting that right now is interest rates.

Interest rates are rising rapidly, approaching 5% in a lot of markets. And with that, it's pricing a lot of buyers out of the market. And if they're not priced out of the market, it's for them to readjust what they can afford downward. They can't afford that high price because the interest rate won't allow it.

So when we're looking at working with sellers, we need to tell them there's a five alarm fire going on in the real estate industry right now.

And it's interest rates. They're rising so rapidly that...

Some pretty amazing news from CoreLogic this week shows that the average American in the country had an equity gain of drum roll

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…

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$55,300.

That's more than a lot of people making a year with their normal wage.

So that's a huge increase. That's why real estate's one of the number one wealth pullers in America is this equity buildup.

Now, if you happen to be on the west coast where I live, it's even greater. And in a lot of areas of the country, it's even greater. For instance, in Washington state, that number was $95,000. Where I live here in Oregon, it was $59,000. And if you happen to live in California, one of the highest equity gains in the country, $117,000 in equity gain. Now, what do we do with this information?

Well, one thing we can do is do a social media post or an email out to our entire database.

And here's what we might say:

"Hey, your home is better than average, right? The average...

How are you incubating leads once you've captured them? One of the best strategies you can have is having an email marketing campaign.

What a lot of the top producers in the country do is they use Constant Contact or Mailchimp.com and these are systems that are super easy, point and click, that you can build an email newsletter and send out. Some people use BombBomb if they wanna do a video version of it.

But all of these are email related. Now, why wouldn't they just do social media where it seems like all the action is well?

Remember when you do a social media post, that's only gonna be in front of maybe 2 to 4% of your audience.

You're not gonna have a hundred percent of your audience receiving the message. But with the email marketing, literally a hundred percent of your audience receives your message.

So that's a huge advantage, right? And that's something that we can use.

Now not of 'em are gonna open it, but certainly they're gonna...

I'm gonna give you two techniques today that can really transform what you're doing on social media.

Why?

Because a lot of agents on social media are doing the same old, boring posts. They're not getting a lot of engagement. Nobody really cares. Nobody's really watching. And so they wonder why they're struggling and other agents are doing so well.

There's a few reasons.

Now one is that people are seeing repetitive posts. They're seeing the same posts from the same REALTORS over and over and over again. And they get boring. They just become noise. So how can you break through?

I'm gonna give you two strategies right now:

1. Educational marketing

Educational marketing means you're teaching somebody. So you're the teacher, they're the student. We're experts in this industry. And we could come up with a list of a hundred things we could talk about about the real estate market easily that other people outside the industry don't know.

We could...

The Fed just raised interest rates, no secret there. It went up by a quarter percent. And it's likely that we're gonna see interest rates go much higher than they are today.

And so there's concern in the marketplace, like what are these interest rates gonna mean for the real estate market? There's a lot of differences between where we're at today in the market and where we've been in the past. For instance, right now we have the lowest supply of homes ever recorded. So that's gonna indicate that demand is probably gonna stay pretty strong and healthy because we need more supply to fill the demand.

But there could be a situation where you get to what's called buyer resistance. And that's where buyers say, "I can't afford to pay anymore for a mortgage payment."

We're not there yet. We still have high demand. And just by comparison, yes, rates are higher than they were a year ago certainly. But if we go back decade by decade,...

Listen and learn as serial entrepreneur Raymond Sjolseth shares his journey of opening 45 different businesses during his incredible career. His journey will inspire and motivate you to break through your personal barriers and limiting beliefs by diving deep into what creates truly successful companies. Raymond also shares how he plans to use his skills at business by focusing on simple, repeatable strategies in the real estate business. As an expert in creating scalable, repeatable results in business and for his clients his approach to the real estate industry is something we can all learn from!

What are the five digital tools that buyers want most from us as real estate professionals?

I'm gonna give 'em to you right now:

1. A 3D virtual tour of the homes they're looking at online

There's an interesting study recently by NAR that shows that the average buyer today looks at eight homes over eight weeks before they make a buying decision. But of the eight homes, they look at three of them virtually. And in their minds, they consider that to be that they've seen the house. So three virtual showings kind of crazy, right? I'm gonna talk about virtual showings a little bit more in just a second.

But in order to do that virtual showing, if I'm the listing agent, what do I need to have? I need to do that Matterport tour. I need to do that similar or tour in some form or fashion so people can really feel like they came through the house.

2. A digital floor plan

If you're selling new construction especially. Give them that floor...