Affordability is on the tip of everybody's tongues right now.

Why is affordability so important?

Well, it's a measurement of how affordable it is for the average person in America to own a home.

NAR has studied this every single month and they gave us a Home Affordability Graph. And you might expect this, but home affordability has actually been going up because of something substantial, which is interest rates going down.

As interest rates go down, affordability goes up.

That's despite the fact that we've had actually super fast rising prices, right? Prices starting to go into double digit territory across the country. And then we see interest rates going down, which pushes affordability up.

But because home prices have gotten so high recently, that's actually starting to level off and come back down. But we recently had another upswing. So we're measuring a few things when we look at affordability.

When NAR looks at...

Something super exciting happened in the last month that we haven't seen in the last 15 years:

Home prices on existing homes exceeded home prices for new homes.

Think about what I just said:

Existing home prices exceeded new home construction. So it was actually cheaper to go buy a brand new house nobody had ever lived in than buying an existing home. Absolutely amazing.

Lots of reasons behind that. But one of the reasons is normally when you're buying new construction, you're locking in a price six months earlier. And then they complete the new construction and you move in.

Well, the market has super accelerated in those last 6 months. And guess what's also happened:

Now, if you were to try to pull that off, what's happened with all kinds of lumber, supplies, and even appliances?

Prices have gone up.

So this will probably not be repeated anytime soon because now prices on new construction are beginning to rise again.

But what...

We're all dealing with multiple offers on almost every single listing that we take. So how do you approach the presentation of these multiple offers to a seller?

That's a really key consideration because a confused mind says no. So how do you help sellers not get confused?

One of the ways is by helping them simplify the process of reviewing all these offers. I like to encourage my students to use a one-page summary form. The one-page summary form will have some very simple data on the front page. And you can make that the cover page on all the offers.

So what's on the summary form?

Here's what it is:

1. Price

2. Net offer

You want to put what the actual net to the seller is. As you know, sometimes in an offer, people will put some expenses that cost the seller some money. So you want to show the price of their offering, but also the net to the seller or net offer.

3. Show if it's a cash sale or a loan

If it's a loan, what kind of...

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What percentage of Americans would you guess paid off their home?

Think about that for a second: Completely own their home, free and clear.

In other words, when you're driving down the street in your neighborhood, out of 10 homes, how many people have paid their home off and outright own it?

Would it be 2 homes, 3 homes, 4 homes?

The answer is 38% of Americans have paid off their home in full, which is absolutely amazing.

The equity for homes in America is off the charts. It's incredible. So that's good.

Now, why do I bring this up?

The reason I bring it up is because people that have equity in their home actually have a huge, powerful advantage when it comes to moving up to their dream home.

And here's why:

They can actually do something that a lot of sellers can't. They could go buy a home and finance their second home (what they're going to buy next). And they won't have two mortgages.

So they have no pressure on themselves when it...

Sometimes a seller will say to you, "Well, just sell it to a cash buyer. I don't want to deal with financing."

Have you heard that? We all have from time to time. When you have a seller say that to you, you need to arm yourself with good information so you counter that. And help them understand that the market isn't comprised of a ton of cash buyers.

The good news is that there are more cash buyers that there has been. We've seen a huge uptake in cash buyers. But the current number as of today, in all across the country, is that 25% of the sales done in the country are now cash buyers.

But what's the reverse of that number? The reverse of that number is 75% of the sales are not cash sales. So they're involving some level of financing. Which means that when we list a property, we have to sell it four times in order to create a sale.

We have to sell it to the market, to get them excited about that listing. That's creating that...

We've just had some excellent news about where homeowners' heads are regarding selling their home.

The latest study shows that 67% of homeowners believe today is a good time to sell, which is one of the record highs we've seen with this kind of thought process.

But when we go deeper into those numbers, according to Realtor.com, it shows this:

1 in 10 homeowners plan to sell this year. 1 in 10!

Think about that when you're driving home tonight and you're driving through your neighborhoods. 1 in 10 of these homes that you're driving by is going to be listed in the next year!

But here's something that's even more exciting:

63% of those are going to be listing their home in the next six months.

The only question is... Who are they going to list with? Is it going to be with you or your competitor?

And if it's your competitor, why did they get the listing when you missed out? The reason is they did one thing that you didn't do:...

You'd think by now everybody that was going to refinance their home would have already done it.

Interest rates have been at record lows for months, right? But the answer is, that's not true.

There are 5 million homeowners in America that could benefit from refinancing. And here's how it breaks down, which is crazy:

450,000 of those loans have interest rates above 6.17%. Isn't that amazing In this day and age?

A million of those loans have interest rates above 4.39%.

And 3.6 million have interest rates above 4.21%.

So when we look at that, that's a huge opportunity for you to educate the market in your local area about the power of refinancing. Try partnering with a lender in your local market. And you guys could talk about that through a video or email — really reaching out and doing a good job with communication.

Now what's more powerful about this?

Did you know that when you refi a house, you don't get quite the best rate. You know...

What's one thing we all need to be concerned about?

Inflation.

We're starting to see inflation rise across many spectrums of the economy. And it is a little bit unnerving when we look at it. Inflation has actually crossed the 2% threshold it's actually past 4% right now.

It's different every month, but it's rising fast across all kinds of asset classes and employment. We're starting to see that real, serious pressure on wages. And a lot of wages have driven up.

We now have more job openings in our country than we've ever had recorded before. Think about what I just said: Job openings are wide open.

This idea that we have an unemployment rate is almost ridiculous because every American -- based on the amount of openings right now -- could be employed. They're choosing not to be employed in some areas or they're choosing not to go to work because of wages or whatever. But in a lot of areas, there's not just enough jobs, there's too...