When you drive around your neighborhood or your community, you're gonna see some dilapidated houses. And you know, who else sees those? The city and county.

So what the city and county generally have is a compliance officer that's in charge of enforcing the city and county standards for how homes and properties should be maintained.

Now their standards are probably much lower than our standards, but they have to keep these properties to a certain standard. And if they don't do that, they give the homeowner or the property owner a violation notice. And this violation notice can become sequentially more serious with large fines attached to them.

So why am I bringing this up?

Well, it's a marketing opportunity.

One of the highest concentrations of buyers today is buyers looking for flip opportunities. These dilapidated properties, they can turn around and flip and, and turn a profit on. But there's not very many of them out there.

So think about this as an opportunity in...

We're coming into spring. And what do you see during spring? You see a lot of garage sales and estate sales as you're driving around through neighborhoods.

When you see that this should be a red flag opportunity for you. Because what you could do is circle back, just write down the address and write a little note. Or if you have the REDX, a system like that, you could find their phone number or their email address, and you could just send a message over. That's something like this:

"Hey, as a local REALTOR, I noticed you had a recent garage sale or estate sale. I hope it was super successful. Quick question: Are you considering a housing change? Many people who conduct a sale are preparing to relocate or sell the home, which is the reason for my question. Also my office as several buyers interested in the neighborhood. So if you'd consider an offer in your home, I'd love to have a chance to chat at your earliest convenience."

What an interesting, simple technique. By the w...

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 a lot of buyers resist it 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 market in the United States. Let's cal...

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 the reason why we wanna be s...

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 they're gonna put a crimp on seller'...

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

…

…

…

$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 homeowner gained $55,300 in equity last year. But your home is ...

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, let's go back to the decade when interest rates...

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 plan. Some people call that that doll h...

Here's a number that we should be talking about with our spheres of influence, our friends, our social media audiences:

And this is 15.9.

Now what's 15.9 represent?

15.9% is the amount that the average renter had as an increase in the rent last year.

15.9%!

And it's likely that this is gonna have again this year or some similar high number, and probably the year after that.

Why?

It's supply and demand. There is high demand and low supply. So it's the same thing that's happening to us in the real estate industry, right? We have low supply, high demand causes prices to rise.

So if renters aren't careful what can happen is if rents continue to rise, they could have rent that's increasing by 10%, a year or more over the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years. They could easily be paying 30, 40, 50% more for rent in a few years.

And they think their rent's high now. Wait another couple years, it's gonna get higher.

So what can they do? What's the solution?

The solution is to take a l...