A few of you are suffering from what I call referral resistance. What's referral resistance mean? It means you've got a pretty good size database of people, a sphere of influence, and it's not performing well.

In other words, you're not getting a lot of referrals. Your sphere of influence isn't sending you buyers and sellers.

Why?

It's because the people in your sphere don't quite trust you enough. They don't quite see you as the expert that you know you are. And because of that, there's resistance to sending you referrals.

So how can you overcome referral resistance?

I'm gonna give you three quick techniques to help you with that:

1. You have to be the experts in their minds, not yours.

How do you do it? You need to be giving them information regularly about the real estate market. Now, this is super easy to do because you are given information all the time. One of the places you are given information from is your local MLS system....

There's a great book I'm gonna recommend to you called Influence by Robert Cialdini. In the book, he talks about the power of sales language. And how your language, when you're selling can have such a massive impact on your performance.

We tend to just wing it in this business. We tend not to know our lines. And we just kind of think that our sheer great personality is always gonna win the day. But that's a mistake. Just like any true professional, we should memorize some things in the real estate industry.

Not that everything's canned and everything's planned. But there are some things we need to memorize.

When you think about the highest paid professionals in any the industry—whether it's a doctor, whether it's an attorney, whether it's a CPA—do those three professions have to memorize some things in order to pass their bar exam and their accountants exams and all their other exams?

Absolutely. And you better hope that...

How many times when you're talking to a potential seller, do they bring up commissions today?

That conversation is probably happening more often than ever before today because it's a hyper competitive market. We're seeing a lot more commission conversations and people trying to negotiate our commissions to some degree.

So I had this great quote that was given to me by a Ninja student. Ninja is a great program. If you haven't taken the ninja class, highly recommend you do it. I've done it for my agents and brought them in twice to teach to my group. But they had a great quote here for dealing with the commission conversation.

So here's the quote (and it's so good):

"Hey, let me ask you this. I totally understand you're asking about commission but let me ask you just a quick question around that:

Do you believe that your house is gonna sell for a fixed price or do you believe it'll sell in a range of value depending on the negotiation...

I did a class recently, teaching in Southern California. And I conducted a random study during the class. And we were talking about the aspect of being a "hyperlocal agent." Maybe you've heard that term before.

This is where you're connecting, not just with the people in your community, but the community itself. Because if you think about yourself as a person that might move to a new area, what will be the first thing you do?

First thing you're doing is Googling it, right? You're gonna hop on the internet and you're gonna Google that place. You're gonna check it out and you're gonna research it. And the keywords you use for your search would be the city name, right?

But you know, the other place that everyone's gonna go is not just Google, but also YouTube.

That's what I do every time I'm going on vacation, I'm checking out hotels. I'm looking at the air to get a feel for it. I'm YouTubing the heck out of it, right?

So we did a little search for...

Hey guys, some really interesting information regarding remote working and what's happening in the country.

A lot of employers today are saying, "Hey, we started with remote working because we had to. COVID made us do it. But now we're starting to see, this is a really good kind of situation. We spend less on housing our employees in a building somewhere and we can work from home. And great news as a lot of 'em are more productive at home than they were at the office."

So, interesting, interesting study that was just done about this.

And it's related to housing in that 19% of people that are looking to buy a house are doing so because they now have a remote working situation.

See, during the middle of COVID employers were like, "Well, we're gonna let you do this, but then you're gonna have to come back home to the office."

Now they're saying, "Hey, no, you know what? Just keep working from home. We don't care."

Now this gives the freedom...

Hey guys, quick market update for you:

We know that the CPI—the consumer price index—has risen dramatically. And right now it's running about 7% to 7.5%, depending on which economist you talk to.

That means that inflation's skyrocketing. The cost of goods and services is skyrocketing. Wages are skyrocketing. And so is the cost of getting a new loan or a new mortgage on a home.

Now, why are loans affected? They are affected because the federal government looks at this as a lever that they can push on the economy to slow the economy down and put the brakes on the growth in the country.

So since November of last year, through roughly today, we've seen a 300-point basis jump in what interest rates are costing Americans.

Now to put this in perspective because what does 300 basis points even mean?

It means that if you were gonna try to get November's interest rate today, it would cost three points. Three points, every a hundred...

Hey guys, I wanna give you a quick strategy when you are listing a house for the first time and you're having a conversation with a seller.

I call it my "Many Buyer Eyes" Strategy. And here's how it works:

I say...

"Hey, you know what? One thing I do with all my sellers when I list their properties for sale is I treat you as a buyer. And what that means is that I'm gonna act like you're a buyer for your own property and your own price range. So I'm gonna set you up in the MLS as if you're a buyer looking in the 400-500k price range in your market area, in our MLS zone that we're in with similar attributes of your house. Here's why I'm doing this: I want you to see in real time the listings that are being presented to buyers that are searching for home like yours.

So you're gonna see all your competition, all the price reductions, all the pending transactions, they're gonna be coming to you. And I want you to look at them because we...

I want to talk to you about what I call the algorithm of sales. And what that means is that there's some base numbers in our industry, that if you embrace them, it can unlock unlimited opportunity.

The problem is most agents don't want to embrace them. They just want somebody to hand them a buyer or seller. Or for a buyer or seller to literally lay down in front of them so they can just start working with them.

Guys, that doesn't work.

You have to go out there and work the numbers if you want to do well.

I'm going to give you six numbers that are going to be just what I would call standard in the industry that you have to embrace for you to have success.

1. For every 30 conversations you have, you'll average one closing.

So if you want to make 300, 400, 500, $600,000 a year, you just have to figure out how many closings you need. And then multiply that number by 30, which will tell you how many conversations you need to have in...

What is Q2?

Well, Q2 is your most valuable asset. And you might not even know it.

Your most valuable asset is your database, your sphere of influence, we know that.

But what's Q2 mean?

Q2 represents the quality and the quantity of your database. So let's look at those two issues and how they can impact your bottom line coming into the new year.

Let's start with the quantity. What does that mean? Well, if we know that for every 10 people in our database, we'll average one closed sale, knowing that quantity makes a big difference. In fact, when I talk to agents on a regular basis, and I ask, how many transactions did you close last year? And they say 10, 12, I'll say, how big is your database? Let me guess. It's probably 80 to 120 am I right? Most people will say, yeah, you're right on the money.

Why?

Because your database is a reflection of your performance. Smaller database, smaller performance. Larger database, larger...

This time of year, a lot of people start thinking about pivoting — making a fundamental change in their business strategy. That's a good idea, because if you want to have that 90 degree turn in your business, you need to think about what you can do to actually make that a reality.

Not just talk about it, but actually make it a reality.

I'm gonna give you five quick points that I've learned over the years that can really help you have a successful pivot in your business and make fundamental change happen for you.

1. Mental toughness

This is underrated, but how many of us have started new year's resolutions with the best of intentions, but then falling apart within 30 days? We’ve all been guilty of that (myself included).

So mental toughness, getting your mind, your body, your spirit in alignment with that decision and saying, I'm not just doing this today or tomorrow or next day or next week, I'm doing it for...