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...

If you want a quick way to generate conversation through text with your Sphere of Influence, here's a great message that's resonating with a lot of my coaching students.

Look at your Sphere of Influence. Pull 5 or 10 people you're going to text today. And here's what you're going to say:

"Hey, have you ever looked at what your home is worth on Zillow? I'm curious as an agent, do you think it's sort of close, wrong, or right on the money?"

Watch what happens when you put this out to your Sphere of Influence.

Now, you can do it through a text or you could post it on social media. It's a great social media post and I guarantee you're going to get into a lot of conversations with people.

The end result of these conversations should be that Zillow is wrong 95% of the time.

In other words, 95% of the time, they don't get within 5% of their eventual sales price of the property. That Zillow's own data.

By the way, if you haven't looked at it,...

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...

Something interesting that you might find surprising that it relates to real estate, but fertility rates in the US have gone down dramatically over the last hundred years. In America today, we've actually had another 1% decrease.

We have the lowest birth rates than we've had in a hundred years.

Here are the numbers:

For every 1000 women in America aged between 15 and 44, there's 58.3 births. And you compare this to World War Two, when all the baby boomers were born, that number was more closer to 140 births! So huge difference in the numbers.

Now, how does this relate to real estate? I'm going to share with you now. Here is the the data today:

Looking at buyers who have children under the age of 18 in the home, the share of that group has declined from 58% in 1985, all the way down to 33% in 2020. So there's a much smaller group of people buying homes. It's actually the minority, not the majority, who have kids under 18 at home.

So you need to...

One question we always receive as REALTORS is - What's going to happen next? What's the crystal ball for where prices are going over the next 12 months? 

According to the NAR, Zelman, Realtor.com, Freddie Mac, CoreLogic, Fannie Mae and the Mortgage Bankers Association, the average of all those top industry insiders and economists within those groups, their prediction for the next 12 months is that we're going to see appreciation at 3.9%. You might think that sounds low. After all we just went through a year where we had double digit appreciation and in many markets we saw appreciation as high as 15-16% . Why would this group of economists predict such a low number when most of us would reasonably expect it to be double digits or high single digits (at the very least).  

The reason is I think those economists know something - When you have a low supply and high demand, what happens? Prices go up. When supply increases, it puts pressure on...

Every year, Gallup conducts a survey of Americans to determine their choice for the best long-term investment. Respondents are asked to select real estate, stocks/mutual funds, gold, savings accounts/CDs, or bonds.

For the seventh year in a row, real estate has come out on top as the best long-term investment.

Gallup explained: “Real estate remains the most favored investment to Americans, as has been the case since 2013, when the housing market was on the rebound. More than a third of Americans have named real estate as the top investment since 2016.”

This year’s results indicated 35% of Americans chose real estate, followed by stocks at 21%.

Check out this video for post/message to share with your sphere of influence, social audience, or farm area.