If you know people in your sphere of influence that own investment property, I've got some good news. Also, if you own an investment property, I've got good news. And if you're trying to sell investment property, I've got good news:

The investment property side of our business is going through a real resurgence right now. We knew during COVID they got kinda hit. We know the eviction moratoriums made it really tough for them. But now we're starting to see people come back out of that.

So here's a few good numbers in that arena that come from us from the NAR economist blog:

Two of them are dealing with absorption rates. Absorption rates, meaning how many units are being absorbed by the market.

In Q2 and Q3 of this year, 700,000 units were absorbed by this market. It's a lot of units, but completely instantly absorbed by the market.

Vacancy rates have fallen in 2011-ish from 6.9 back then all the way down to 4.6 now. That's a nationwide...

I have some good news for people that already own a home that are in your database.

Here's the stats:

According to the KCM blog, home equity is up 29.3% across the board — which equals $51,500 in added equity over the past 12 months.

So then the question is:

Well, what can people do with that equity?

And there are a lot of things they could do:

They could pull it out in cash with a refinance, of course. They could take that equity and use it as a way to move into their dream home by stepping up — and there's a lot of people out there that may not realize that they can step up into their dream home with very little changes in their payment because of their equity.

There are tons of conversations you can have here.

Take that data, repackage it, and push it out to your people in your sphere of influence and start having conversations with them.

You could say, "Hey, would you like to get a specific number for how much equity build...

Zillow announced recently that they've stopped buying homes!

In their press release, they said they had supply chain issues and labor shortages, which is interesting because when you look at what they actually did in Q2 and Q3, where we've had kind of the same issues going on, they actually doubled the amount of homes that they purchased during that time compared to last year.

So why would they go from twice the amount they were buying last year to stopping on October 18th?

Some people are saying that one reason might be they're seeing market changes, just like we've been talking about. They're seeing a lot more listings coming to market which creates pricing pressure and competition. So they may not be able to come in and pay these high prices and then resell it at an even higher price. Because Zillow runs a flipping operation, right?

So we're actually seeing that. I've got a lot of students and a lot of parts of the country that...

How long do people stay in their homes? It's an interesting question. And it's a question that's related to marketing for us.

Prior to 2008, the average person stayed in their home five years before they moved on. So quite a bit of turnover there.

From 2008 to 2016, that number moved up to eight years.

And now that number has gone even higher — it's now 10.6 years.

So why are people staying in their homes longer? Well, there's lots of reasons.

The Great Recession had an impact. Super low interest rates have an impact. Having less inventory in the markets for people to move up to and change homes has also made a big impact.

But one question we should know and ask our clients is how about our local market? How about with our own sphere? What does that look like for the people that you're actually doing business with?

It's a great text. It's a great social media post to ask this question:

"The average homeowner spends 10.6...

Hey guys, the market's shifting. That's no surprise here — we've been seeing it for a few months. We're starting to see buyers put up some walls and say, "Hey, wait a second. I'm not going to pay infinity for a home."

And so buyers are slowing down their activity and we're seeing that. And it's also causing inventories to rise, which in turn, is causing sellers to try and avoid missing the boat so they're jumping in. This is causing inventories to rise even more.

So the whole market is starting to change. Not radically yet, but it will accelerate over time. And it's natural. It's normal. We're never going to have a straight up market forever. Right now, some people would argue that we're 12 years into a seven-year cycle.

Now for us, I have a question for you because you are either an agent that's market-driven or strategy-driven.

If you're market-driven, then high tide floats all boats. You do well in a great market and you do...

We just got stats that show listings have increased again. For the past several months, they've been increasing. And now they've increased again by another 4.1%.

So now we're about 2.6 months of supply in the country. Not a lot, but more than it's been in a long time.

So we're starting to see listings come back to market.

The question is: Are you starting to see more listings come into your portfolio?

If you're not, you have to ask yourself why.

The number one reason why we don't have as many listings as we should is we're just simply not asking for them. We're not asking enough people to give us listings as we should. And we're not asking for enough referrals.

I'll give you one technique that blew my mind recently that one of my students used. And I received it because I'm on his mailing list.

He sent me his resume, his resume letter, the resume letter had a cover letter, just like a regular resume. And on the cover letter, it...

What should you be doing right now?

It's a question I get all the time as a coach.

I'm going to hand to you right my 9 Point Ultimate Business Strategy for every single person that's listening to this.

If you just apply this by 30 days, I want you to email me personally and tell me exactly what happened. Feel free to DM me. I would love to hear how has a blown up your business because I know it will.

Nine points you can implement today in your business. Ready? Write these ideas down.

Here we go:

1. Implement the "5x5x5 Strategy"

This is five calls. Five texts, five cards every day. Okay. That's one strategy we can implement.

2. Networking

Networking is so important and it's one of the most missed opportunities. We should be doing 1-2 networking meetings a week with somebody in our sphere of influence. Where we're connecting human being to human being.

Ideally you want to go higher than that. But 1-2 would be the minimum. This...

If I were to ask you, what is your business strategy right now? Would you be able to write it down in two or three sentences — your specific strategy and how you're approaching the marketplace?

If not, you may have an issue because you might be market-driven and we don't want to be market-driven.

Why?

Because a market is kind of a high tide floats all boats kind of situation. What happens when the tide's not with you? And you're kind of fighting the market.

That's where you're going into a danger zone. And none of us want to be there. As Vince Lombardi said:

"Hope is not a strategy."

We absolutely have to have a strategy to survive and thrive in this business.

And one of the biggest things that we should be doing every day is understanding that we have a job that probably most people don't identify with. And our number one job isn't sales.

Our number one job is data collection. That is adding people to our funnel so that we can...

There's a question that we've had for a while now, which is: When are listing is going to come back in full force?

When can we have that expectation that we're going to start to see listings en masse start to come back to the marketplace?

We know there's been hesitancy because of COVID, but now that people are getting vaccines and the economy is strong. So when are we going to start to see people coming back and saying, Hey, I'm ready to make a sale. I'm ready to make a change.

There's an answer for us.

Zillow just did an extensive study talking to industry experts across the country. And the consensus is that it's going to be in the second half of 2021.

So we're coming right up onto that pretty soon here. And we're going to be right in the middle of 2021, which means we're going to start to see an acceleration of listings.

The question is: Are you ready for it? Are you out there lead generating to start stacking up that business now?

So here...

Have you ever heard of the aggregation of marginal gains? I hadn't either until I read a story about the British cycling teams winning the Tour de France. They never won the Tour de France before 2010. But their new coach, David Brailsford, challenged them to look at everything they're doing — even the smallest things — to see if there was a way to improve it.

They started with the typical things you'd look at like their diets and exercise programs. But then he went a step further — and started looking at the pillows cyclists were using, the exact time they fell asleep and woke up, their daily routines and more to give them insight into their overall training system.

They figured out that even a 1% increase in any area of efficiency would aggregate marginal gains and finally create wins.

You can do the same thing in your real estate career. You have so many different avenues you're managing, but just getting 1% better in each of these areas can create big wins for...