How to Close More Deals in a Cooling Real Estate Market

And we want to talk a little bit about the downturn that things that are happening in the market if there is a downturn if there is a crash, and then what should Realtors really do if they’re thinking that? Well, the market is going to calm down if the market is going to cool down? And then where do we go from there? Are we going to see a crash?

People Always Need a Home

There’s a lot of conversation about affordability, about inflation, interest rates, all of that, just to gain some perspective here. Some of our perspectives are kind of skewed.

People are always going to need a place to live regardless.

And there are going to be a time where, hey, we got to get used to the new norm, and then make the right decision for our family and move forward. So in terms of that concern, there’s always going to be moving in terms of buying and selling homes.

Recession Plus Jobs

This is the first recession that we have a lot of jobs. In most recessions you have the recession plus no jobs. So there’s, there’s good positivity around that. We still have the lack of inventory. You can’t build as many houses as you need to. So you still have the demand. And so in many of our places that are across the country, we still may not have as many multiple offers, but we sell multiple offers. And we still have people coming in.

A Healthier Recession

The last time when there was a recession, there were a lot of mortgage default swaps. There were a lot of issues with the financial system, which we’re not really seeing here now. So it does look like it’s going to be a lot healthier. Recessions will come we’ve seen tons of recessions. But the idea is just to make sure we’re prepared for it. Sure, we’re going to see a bit of a cooldown. Sure. There’s a lot of money in the stock market and that money usually has some velocity, right. So we will see that money moving less around because well there is there’s some of that money fading away from the market. But at the same time,

We’re not going to see people getting homeless or paying really, really high mortgage rates like last time.

I think last time we had people paying 10s of 1000s of dollars, and they had no income. So I think that was double funneling some of that.

How to Close More Deals in a Cooling Real Estate Market

Let’s see what our experts have to say:

Don’t Stop When the Market Goes Down

So I (Sam) used to do a lot of business in Vancouver, Canada, and I was on one of the top teams there. In 2017, and 2016, we saw the market shifting. And that was happening locally in Vancouver because we had some policies going around and so on. But the key thing was, I saw that the market is kind of calming down a little bit and cooling down. And it was like, Okay, well, what do we do now? Do we just stop advertising? And then kind of go easy on it, and then see what’s happening, which is the default thing that you do as a new agent, right? So that’s your default crisis mode. You’re like, Okay, what’s feeding me today? Let’s just do that. What’s feeding the future long-term goals, long-term things that you wanted to do? Let’s pause it a little bit, and see what’s happening

So now the key question is this if you go back to those years, and I and one year after I saw the outcome, right, I had no clients, I had to just start from scratch, I had to double down on advertising, I had to go start building relationships, it was really tough. Because during that year, I just pulled the plug, I was like, Okay, well, let’s just see how things go. And so on. So I think, yeah, tell us, and you’ve seen this multiple times, right, in different different scenarios, the beginning of COVID, than the hurricane and so on.

Do What You Need to Do

There’s a saying that the politics are local, right? You’ve got to know what’s going on in your own market. I don’t care what they’re saying nationwide, worldwide, about Real Estate. You’ve got to know what’s going on with your clients and know what’s going on in your market from an affordability perspective. What the demand is, and so on. The right thing to do is first to know what’s going on. And then second, take those actions.

The gas may go up, still need a house, the gas may go down, still, need a house.

It’s not rocket science. We continue to do the same things we did before to be successful. But we’re more educated on what’s going on. So when we get questions, we’re the expert on a transaction, we need to be an expert on what’s going on in our market as well. So it makes sense. It does. It does.

Market is Different in Different Areas

You need to know exactly what’s going on in your local market like micro-level. Things that are happening in your market. Sometimes we are thinking that okay, the national average price is going up or down. Like that’s very broad. You’re just talking like 300 million people. And you’re talking like, from North Carolina to New York to like Los Angeles to mid-Texas, it’s very different in every market,.

Maybe the average price is going down because no one is buying a $10 million home in Beverly Hills anymore. But are they really not buying that 200k home in Texas?

So I think that’s the key difference here. Knowing what’s happening locally in that market and educating your buyers and sellers is key, like just telling them: Hey, this is where the market is heading. Sure. Maybe it’s not as crazy as last year. But look, the average price is still going up. We’re still getting a lot of whatever it is for that market.

Focus on Referrals

We’ve made the decision to completely give our business over to our past clients and our business partners. And what that looks like is we’re high touch. We do it through phone calls, handwritten notes, through face to face visits with all the gifts, and through client events where we invite our entire people because one of the principles is, if you work with somebody who knows, likes, and loves you, they’re gonna send you business and usually the quality of the referral is higher than a lead. So lead is someone I met and when I meet somebody who knocks on my door, I have a high level of suspicion. But if I’m calling my friend who refers another friend, there’s a high amount of trust there. So it’s easier to grow the business. So that’s our kind of our background and how we’ve done it and we’ve done 100% Literally 100% by referrals since 2009 So it’s been a long, long road for us. We were able to serve 91 families last year, and this is completely by referral. We don’t advertise. We literally don’t. We work with our favorite people and this and that.

Pandemic and Other Misfortunes

We had the Hurricane Harvey. Our entire city shut down Real Estate-wise for two months starting in September. It was a pandemic. We had the Texas freeze. We had before that was a pandemic, then the freeze. And then now we have this new thing with affordability, inflation rates, and all that stuff. In each of those times, it was super, super important to reconnect with our clients, because they’re getting messages from all sources, social, and friends. And their opinion is getting formed by all these other like really, really high emotional negative vibe. And you have to bring the voice of reason and your knowledge about the market during the pandemic when we finally found out that we could work.

The Pandemic and Technology

At shutdown, I had nine transactions ad they all closed, two of which were international. And the sellers had to go to the US Embassy to get notarized, which also shut down. So I was like, “I don’t know how we’re going to do this. But we will do this, and we will get it through”. So in the pandemic, both Carrie and I started this happy hour on Zoom, and we invited all our friends. And we stumbled through the technology, we figured out this thing called stream yard, we’re able to channel through all the different channels, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook, on both profiles and LinkedIn. So 61 days, we did a happy hour. And that brought a little bit of normalcy to our clientele: “Hey, everything’s gonna be good.”

Then we started bringing on different guest speakers to talk about what they’re doing at home, or how they’re coping, and then what super insightful things you can do with their family to bring some sense of normalcy as well. It was such a good time. In addition, we kept calling people, “Hey, do you need anything? Is there anything that we can help with?” We reached out, we wrote notes, we really, really engaged with people on a human normal.

But our group, the people we interact with fall into one of three categories. They’re either

• People that we that know, they can trust us that we enjoy their companionship
• They’ve done a transaction
• They’re under contract, or we’re working on getting something under contract for them at the time.

How to Cope with Recession

We just want to see them face to face. We bring them a little gift from time to time. If I were in your neighborhood, I would pop by your neighbor, buy your home and either drop it off face to face or I’d call you and say hey, I left you a little something on the front porch. Hope you enjoyed the summer. During COVID, when we couldn’t do events, we would do live streams with folks on different topics. I mean, the happy hour was one of them. What’s different is, that

We keep track of our numbers consistently. We don’t allow that self-talk to either make us think things are too rosy, or things are too gloomy.

I have had real estate agents already tell me, Oh, my gosh, this market is crazy. It’s falling apart. And literally, this is the best month I’ve ever had in real estate. And so it’s really easy for me to think, oh, my gosh, it’s better than it really is.

To Serve Clients

It’s sort of like you’re dating someone, right? When you date somebody you want to spend time with, you want to write them a note, you want to send them a little something. And people want to feel special, and we want to serve them. This approach, which always is a good approach with people becasue you’re serving and that comes from a different posture and an intention. And that’s, that’s our hope and our goal, we’re there to serve, and that we’re there to help. And we want it to be an enjoyable process.

Stop Selling

Stop selling, and start getting to educating them, helping them. add value, We’ve seen this with a lot of our videos too. If it was left to realtors, they would go and they will create this five-minute videos about how great they are. They will get off their Porsches and Lamborghinis. And then they will ride a helicopter ride to town. And then

They will call themselves Luxury Realtors. I hate it. It’s not really saying anything. And it’s not really helping anyone get value out of why they should work with you as an agent.

It’s the same thing with email marketing campaigns that they do. They send an email and say open house. Why do I need to look at this again? Thank you for telling me that you have an open house. I could also see it on the MLS.

Add Value

The key thing, is just adding value. Giving them something that they can use, they can educate themselves, they can use it to know what’s happening in the market, instead of just keep saying, Oh, the market is crazy, hot or crazy cold.

What is it looking like? What is the market? How are we going to pass through this phase of the market? What are the fundamentals?

Can you educate me on like, where the interest rates are going? Can you educate me on if the sales are actually falling or not in my area. That’s something that we always miss.

Keep it Short and Sweet

Going back to that five-minute videos, what we’ve seen is Realtors love those. They keep posting them then their audience is like “I don’t need that. I don’t need to know what’s happening.

“Just tell me what’s happening in the market today. Five years down the road. I don’t want that no one knows that. But what would it look like about a month from now in about three to six months from now?”

That’s what a lot of Real Estate agents miss. Yes, you have to show off your brand. Yes, you have to tell me that you’ve sold this home. But the idea is just to really connect and add value and be there for them. I think that’s what I’m getting from your conversation here. And I think that’s really the key thing about building relationships. How often do you follow up with these people? So let’s say you’ve connected Sam is a person in your database. You’ve called me today, what is the next touchpoint aside from an email?

Why Follow up

Let’s say I spoke to Sam today. We either decided we touched base on something specific or just checked in to make sure everything’s fine with Sam, I’ll follow up with a note in the next day or two and write him a personal note, I may reference something in the conversation I may not, it just depends. In my CRM, I’ll take note of any specific items that Sam mentioned. So I know how to follow up with him in the future, I’m going to pop by his house in the next couple of weeks with a lot of value. And then I’m going to send out an email to the folks, the top folks on my database, and it just depends on some folk. those are the folks that I still reach out to, but I may not call them every single time, I may just pop a text or you know, whatever it is. We will consistently follow up.

Just Create a Relationship

The thing that I try to always make sure that they know is I don’t care if you’re looking to buy or sell, it doesn’t make any difference. If you have a question, let’s talk about it, right. Those questions turn into it’s like the wholesaling, somebody asks you how the market is. They don’t care how the market is, they want to know what the value of their home is, how’s the market in their neighborhood, not how the market is worldwide, what’s the market in my neighborhood. Those turn into deals, I mean, literally, turn into deals, I don’t care if it’s two weeks from now or a year and a half from now. But you’ve got to keep track of them and follow up with them consistently.

It is not About Your Needs

Sometimes we put our own personal needs into the mix. And that’s why people get desperate and they start doing all kinds of examples of that, like, oh, my gosh, I haven’t had a closing in a month. Then you start shifting into being the crazy salesperson, hey, do you need to buy over all that stuff? What one of our coaches have told us is:

“If you’re gonna get that crazy, then start contacting more people, instead of hammering people, like just play a game with your mind.”

Your Funnel

Think of it as a funnel, and add more people to the funnel on the top. And then you can have some people that are not interested today, some people that are interested, very interested today, some people that are mid-funnel that you would think in six months to a year and kind of go from there. So in not being able to predict who they are. I’ve got one guy that I worked with, He’s already closed and is part of our database. But I worked with him for two and a half years, he’d have a question, come back, have a question come back. My response wasn’t tied to whether or not he was going to buy it. It was time to serve him and make sure that he’s got all the right information. At some point, the time was right, and we moved forward and got him a great place. He and his kids have a great house now. And he’s referred us to other deals over the course of the last nine months.

So the mindset is:

You can’t control the outcome, but you can control your activities.

If I’m controlling my activities by being proactive, I’m making my phone calls, and I’m committing to tenfold cold phone calls a day. 20 phone calls a day, 30 phone calls a day. I left a message for everyone that didn’t answer and I had about 25 conversations which yielded 25 notes, handwritten notes after that, and I’ve got three referrals from that. The first thing is you got to have a lot of people coming in, then you got to make notes or leave a mark on their phone. For those that you did have a conversation with, you made notes and you followed up the next day or the next time or next week or next year.

Most Leads are on Top Your Funnel

An agent called some guy, he picked up but he’s like, I’m not buying today. Well, what did he expect? He thought like, the person that’s already ready to buy, and they’ve looked at 10 homes, they would just change realtors and come work with them? that’s not going to happen. They just have to build their own relationships, you have to be in that long process of creating that personal experience and personal care for that client. So that when the time comes in, they’re like, Ah, I want to call the property Joe’s.

A Hunter’s Mindset

A coach once told me that:

You’ve got to have a hunter mindset, but a farmer activity.

Sometimes we think both, I want to be a hunter and a hunter on both things right now. That’s not how the industry works. You cannot do that. I can be a hunter and very proactive and act between the conversations, I’m going to call 100. I’m going to write 100 notes, I can be very, very direct and proactive. But when I’m with a client, we’re having a good time. We’re having a good conversation, I’m answering his questions or her questions. Sometimes I have to watch my pace because the personality of the person is different. But then when we’re done with it, I conclude with that moment in time I move to the next and then move to the next. Try to build what we call seeds, your seed planting everywhere. I need to fertilize over here, but not every year. That’s all depending upon whether the relationship blossoms and then really try to cultivate it. Because sometimes you can cultivate really well in one area.

Farm Your Land

Some people you email some you basically phone some because some people like to phone right and it’s the key is to just keep being present on top of the sphere of influence your sphere of influence the people that know you and trust you. But just just just keep keeping on top of that, that network. I think that’s great. So if let’s say there is a recession happening, for whatever reason, it’s happening. Okay. And let’s say it’s, let’s say six months to a year from now. And you see that happening right now? What would you do? If it’s a year from now and you see a lot of things happening? What would you do? What is the first thing that you would cut off? And what is the first like spending what’s right? What is the first expense that you would cut? And what is the first three things or what are the three? First three things that you would double down on?

Do not Cut Down on Marketing

When the market goes down, if an opportunity comes to cut down your costs, which is the clothes in the office, or on an expensive talent, leaving your team, just take it easy until you figure it out. Every time I see a market shift, for two, three months, no one buys or sells. Then there’s a lot of buyers all of a sudden. You just see a ton of new buyers coming into the market and no one looks for listings anymore. Because you get this listing, you get another seller from it, what do you do with it, you just have more open houses to do on the weekend. Then no one wants to sell, but there’s going to be some really active buyers that would just have saved up the cash, they want to go buy during the downturn. When that time comes in, and they’re ready to buy it and pull the trigger, now you’re there, so they can call you.

How Would You Measure Success on Social Media?

Some people try to boil the ocean with social media, they want to capture everything. For a lot of times, for us, it’s really just a way to reinforce those relationships with our database that we already have. And so things like this is important for them to see us out there doing that they know what we’re up to. And social media is a great way to share that with them. Social media, just a follow on him, for us is an extension of our relationship, right? So we try as best as we can, because it can be get very much distracting. No, they say, social media is interruptive marketing. And that’s true.

A Piece of Advice

Energize your fear, take action, double down on your your activities. If you’re calling five people a day, challenge yourself, go 10. Go 15. And start now because you’re the one and you’re the voice of reason, right? You’re the one that can make sure people are calm, right? Show them the facts. Stay out of politics, please stay out of politics. And you’ll thank us later. Remember, do this. Stay consistent for the next, I don’t know, four to five weeks, and you’ll reap a reward in Q3 and Q4.

Final Words

Stay consistent. And whatever it is that you’re doing social media, follow up whatever it is, that is winning you more business. And also remember that you have to educate your audience, you have to tell them things that would benefit them. Stop just posting random stuff, stop posting memes. I know we love memes on social media. It’s not it’s funny, it’s good. It’s nice, but stop shop, stop talking bad things about the market, but also start adding real value. Tell them what’s going on in the market. And I think that is the key thing that we miss a lot.