Lawrence Yun was recently quoted as saying, "If you are under the age of 40, you have never seen inflation this high in this country."

The inflation rate in November hit a record 6.8%. That's the highest we've seen in decades.

So when we look at these numbers and everybody's talking about inflation, how does this relate to estate?

It's an interesting conversation. It's something that we should talk about with our clients.

Here's the good news when it comes to real estate:

Real estate is a tremendous asset and a hedge against inflation. That's why last year, we saw a record number of people investing in real estate. In fact, it was the the highest recorded ever. The percentage of homes purchased was 18.2% were sold to investors.

One reason is they're using it as a hedge against inflation.

So here's what's happened according to Lawrence Yun. He says that real estate has proven to be a good hedge against inflation. Some examples:

In the 1970s,...

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...

What are the top seven reasons why someone would want to sell in your market?

Well, according to the National Association of REALTORS new profile of home buyers and sellers across the country, here are the top reasons:

1. They want to move closer to family and friends — 18% of the time.

2. Their home is too small — 17% of the time.

3. Their neighborhood has become less desirable — 11% of the time.

4. Their home is too large — 9% of the time.

(Add the too large to the too small, and you got 26% of the time they want to sell has to do with the size of their home.)

5. A change in their family situation — 9% of the time.

6. Moving due to retirement — 7% of the time.

7. Job relocation — another 7% of the time.

So why do we care?

Here's the reason why:

Instead of talking about generalities like do you want to sell your home? Are you ready to move? Let's talk about specifics when you're doing...

There's a new stat from the National Association of REALTORS, which states that 53% of our buyers and sellers now fall into a specific demographic group.

You can probably guess what that is...

It's the millennial generation.

Millennials aren't kids anymore. They're actually in their mid twenties or early thirties. They are definitely the driving force in the market. And they're far, far bigger than the baby boomer generation ever was.

So when we look at just statistically, the numbers of this, we have to embrace millennial marketing. It's super important.

And there's some things that we can do to do a much better job with them.

1. Social media

You know I was going to say that. That's where they're at. We've got to go where the audience is. That means we're doing 5 to 15 posts a week on different platforms that we know they use.

So some of you might be doing Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, you name it. You just got to figure out...

Okay guys, you've heard me talk about forbearance. I'm going to give you another opportunity within this market that you're all going to want to take advantage of right now.

So we know right now there's 1.86 million homes that are in forbearance. It's about 3.5% of all the mortgages in America.

So when you look at that number, it sounds like a scary number. But 87% of those folks have 10% or more equity.

Now, here is the kicker behind that:

The 12-month period of time that the CARES Act provided is coming to an end for a lot of people. Hundreds of thousands of these properties are now having their forbearance ending.

And this is starting really at scale in September when 450,000 of these homeowners are now going to be at the end of their forbearance period.

Now here's the good news:

87% of those folks have 10% or more equity because we've had such a massive equity buildup over the past 12 months. So they can actually sell....

The listing market is about to blow up. We've seen all kinds of stats around this. Everybody's looking at the same wave coming towards us. The question is, what are we going to do about it?

We know 77% of homeowners believe now's a good time to sell.

1 in 10 homeowner's plans to list in the next year. And 63% in the next six months.

Here are 5 things you must have to get ready for the super surge of listings that's about ready to break into your market right now:

1. An in-depth marketing plan

Now this is a step-by-step, point-by-point marketing plan that's unique to you. Not just your office, not your company, not your brand, but to you personally that you give to every seller.

If you haven't developed this, we've actually developed one for all of our coaching students, which will blow your mind. But you need to take some time to develop one yourself.

2. Recent testimonials

Have you collected those on an 8.5x11 piece of paper...

There's a new study out that shows that 77% of homeowners believe now is a great time to sell their home.

And when you combine that with a recent study we talked about — which is that 1 in 10 homeowners is going to place their home on the market over the next 12 months. And 63% of those will do it in the next six months alone.

Question is:

What are you doing about it?

We know 80% of your business is going to come from a direct result of your sphere of influence. Either direct business or referred business. So we need to dive into that first and foremost.

I'm going to give you three ways to have impact at scale with these folks.

1. A weekly email into your database.

This doesn't cost you a dime, but it's one of the most powerful things you can do to stay top-of-mind.

But that email has to be value-orientated. It can't be garbage that people are going to look at it as spam. It has to be high value.

What's the highest...

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,...

Have you ever heard of Dave Ramsey? A lot of us have heard of Dave Ramsey but he is someone that wasn't super popular like five years ago. But over the last few years, boy, he's really taken a leadership position even within the real estate industry.

So who's Dave Ramsey? Dave Ramsey is a financial author, consultant, and coach. He has a podcast and hosts a radio program, which is highly syndicated across the country in many different media outlets.

What Dave Ramsey is doing is interesting. Because a lot of people don't know that he's now earning upwards of $40 million a year just in real estate referrals.

What he's doing is he positions himself as someone that's the expert. And then people come and say, hey, who does Dave Ramsey trust in each of the markets to list my home? He then collects a referral fee by referring agents to his audiences.

What a brilliant idea.

But what's really interesting about this when we take a hard...