Here's an interesting question I get a lot as a supervising principal broker, and that is this:

Can I, as an agent, talk to an appraiser? Lot of misinformation about this and some appraisers, it's true, just won't talk to you. But you are okay and it's totally ethical for you to talk to an appraiser.

In fact, NAR has a FAQ on this. You can go look it up, but in their FAQ, they specifically state that people that have an interest in the transaction are completely okay in talking to the appraiser. Now, why would we talk to the appraiser? Or what would be the reason?

Well, there's a lot of reasons. One of 'em, we might be just communicating information about the houseless condition. Improvements that have been done. If there was multiple offers on the home, if the comp sets you used are totally appropriate, you can give them a copy of your comps. If the appraiser wants to accept them, they don't have to. New pending transactions that have...

What's the number one reason somebody should be buying a home now as opposed to waiting?

Number one reason is this:

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for NAR at a recent conference said this. He said that it's totally within the realm of possibility that we'll see interest rates at eight and a half percent interest next year in 2023.

Why? We know the Fed has already announced they're gonna do another rate increase in November and another one after that, then they're gonna take a pause. So two more increases are coming and we're already at 7%, eight and a half, maybe a low estimate. So when, although we feel like the interest rate is high, it's not high relative to history. Remember the average interest rate over the last 50 years has been 8%. We're at 7%. So when we look at it from a historical standpoint, it's not as high as we perceive it.

We perceive it to be high because we're basing it on the 60 year low. We just live to...

News from NAR (National Association Realtors) came out recently and they said that home sales are down 23.8%. But strangely, home prices are up 8.4%. So where's the conflict there? How are we having these crazy numbers?

Well, here's the reality — there's two reasons for it:

One is that we are still benefiting from appreciation that happened at the beginning of the year when interest rates were close to 3%.

And the second reason?

We're benefiting from low supply. We still are at a historically low supply, about 3.3 months of supply. Meaning if every REALTOR stopped working today, it would take 3.3 months of time for us to sell out that inventory.

So what's a healthy balance market? A healthy balance market is about six months of supply.

By the way, I want you to get this in your mind. It's completely different than the Great Recession. We entered the great recession with 11 months of supply. Strong buyer's market. We are...

Cristen Lincoln has been practicing real estate for over 29 years. As a top producing REALTOR she brings a wealth of knowledge around building a sustainable business, finding your passion, and being authentic with your clients. Listen as she provides critical insights into building a team that supports ‘awesomeness’ and why showing up every day regardless of your production level is critical to your success. This is a can’t miss interview!

Would it be crazy to buy a house now?

This is a question that people are gonna ask you. I've heard this question come up a few times just in my social circles.

I'm gonna tell you there's two key reasons why it's a great time to buy a house. Not just a good time, but a great time to buy a house.

1. You have more buying power than you've ever had in the last 10 years.

Think about the last year. Just last year, if you were gonna go buy a house, you're competing with 10 other buyers, you're always gonna be in a multiple opera situation. You're gonna have to come in with non-refundable more money, go over full price, have an appraisal gap language, remove inspections before you've even done an inspection. You were at such a disadvantage as a buyer.

Let's contrast that with today:

When you come in as a buyer, first of all, sellers are reducing their prices en masse. Plus, they're gonna reduce their price again, when you make an...

Hey guys, when we're talking to a seller and we're having this conversation about price—because price is the ultimate marketing tool that we have—sometimes it's hard for sellers to understand the relationship between the price and interest rates.

So I wanna give you some scripting and some dialogues along these lines, which is really important. And it's focusing on the difference in affordability for buyers and really how most buyers are payment focused.

So if I'm sitting with a seller, I might say:

"Now you've probably been hearing that the interest rates have been rising. But I wanna relate that to what that means to a buyer for your home. So the beginning of the year, interest rates were pretty much at 60-year lows or around 3% level. And since the beginning of the year, we've really more than doubled. We're now pushing 7% and we're probably gonna be over 7% very soon.

And so here's what...

Here's a target market right now that could be a massive opportunity for us:

We should be looking for opportunities. In every market shift, there's an opportunity. And one opportunity we're starting to see is retirement.

People are accelerating their retirement plans. In fact, the number of retirees in the marketplace is up 13.7% in the third quarter of this year.

Why?

A lot of people just don't wanna face the challenges of recessionary markets and things happening, and that's out of their control. They just want to exit and enjoy the rest of their time, right?

So when you have a retiree, by definition, a lot of times what they do is they want to downsize. They wanna scale back their lifestyle, so they can afford the retirement. And we're seeing this a lot with empty nesters and just people that are ready for the next phase of their lives.

So these retirees are perfect target audience for us in that they're probably...

Now, this is happening a lot:

Buyers are getting skittish about interest rates, especially when they're in the middle of a transaction and their interest rates floated up because they didn't lock in the beginning.

See, a lot of buyers are gamblers. And they're optimists. So when they come into the transaction, they don't necessarily lock right out of the gate and they're gambling that the interest rates will come back down or float back down. But that gamble has not been a good gamble for the last several months.

And so interest has climbed, climbed, climbed. But if you do have that situation where you have a buyer that's had an interest rate that went beyond what they were expecting, it can create a mid-transaction negotiation.

So what you can do is you can come back to the other side and say, "Hey, we have a buyer that was completely excited about buying your house. Unfortunately, interest rates have kind of gone...

30 years ago, when I entered the real estate business, we used to see a clause, and I used to use this all the time myself, that we would build into offers.

And the clause said something to this effect:

"This offer is subject to the buyer qualifying for a loan and the home qualifying for a loan as noted in the offer terms. And you could say the loan type (conventional, FHA VA, whatever you're gonna do there) at an interest rate not to exceed X."

And that was the key part of that language. And I'm not suggesting you use that language exactly, that's something for you to talk about with your broker. But we would just have an interest rate cap built into our offers.

Now, some people would say, Well Jim, when I have my buyers get qualified, they generally lock themselves in. Not every buyer locks themselves in. A lot of buyers like to try to gamble and float it.

So when we build that language in, it gives the buyer an...

What is the picky inspection?

Now, for years we've been in a seller's market. And the last thing we wanted an inspector to do is to come in and kill the deal, right? But today the market is shifting towards buyers. And buyers are starting to gain more and more leverage in the marketplace.

So when I'm counseling my buyers, I might say, "You know, we wanna get an inspection. That's a fair inspection. But I'm kind of leaning towards advising my inspector to be a little bit more picky than they might have been in the past. Let me tell you why:

Because what we're doing when we do an inspection is really looking at health and safety issues and really big structural issues. You know, the roof is going bad, or there's a bad foundation, or something like that. The minor stuff, the things like just noting the age of a water heater and you know that there's a crack in the sidewalk and you know, the basic stuff, the cosmetic stuff is...