ADVICE TO GIVE BUYERS & SELLERS ABOUT THE REAL ESTATE MARKET
Summary
With all the uncertainty in the real estate market, how do you give buyers and sellers advice on what to do?
Here are three keys to giving buyers and sellers good advice:
- Identify their motivation. Figure out if they want to move and their reasons behind it.
- Serve their best interest. It’s not your job to talk them out of what they want. It’s about the client…not you.
- Be a problem solver. Educate them on their options. Lay out the pros and cons and help them decide based on what THEY want. Click here to watch my video on How to Keep Up with Market Changes and become the expert on market statistics https://youtu.be/YMYstOHTQiI. You can also download a FREE MARKET TRACKER on that video.
Your position as an agent is to act on your client’s behalf. They have to know that you’re a competent professional who can guide them in making a decision that’s in their best interest.
Full Transcript
Hi there. It’s Kevin Ward, the founder of YesMasters Real Estate Success Training, helping you get more yeses and more successes in your business and in your life.
I had a great question asked on a YouTube comment about what kind of advice do you give to buyers and sellers about the real estate market? About what they should do? When they should do it? What’s going to happen? Is the market going to go down? Is it going to keep going up? What is going to happen?
Now, as I’m recording this, we are just a couple of weeks away from the 2020 presidential election. We have been in a pandemic for seven or eight months now, and the stock market is still riding high. Housing market and most markets are still going up, but people are unemployed everywhere, businesses have been shutting down like never before. There are millions of homes in forbearance. It’s craziness everywhere. So when you watch, this is going to depend on what is actually happening in the real estate market and in your real estate market.
I’m going to talk about, you got to be aware of what’s happening in your real estate market. But that’s really not the most important thing in terms of how do you advise buyers and sellers on whether they should sell now and so forth. I’m going to share with you three principles for understanding how to advise buyers and sellers to give them good advice that will not only serve them, but will give you more credibility and help you in building relationships with more and more people.
The Right Approach
First, let’s just talk about an approach. This is before I actually get to how do you advise them. But I want to talk about my presupposition of how I approach real estate as an agent, and here is the approach. It is about them, it is not about me. It is about the client, it is not about the agent. You don’t advise as an agent based on what’s good for you. That to me, is called BS. That is bad sales. You should have your license revoked and be kicked out of real estate.
The world is full of BS salespeople who are only interested in representing themselves and making money off of people. I believe that real estate is a much nobler call than that. I believe that your position as a real estate agent is a sacred position. An agent is one who acts on behalf of another, that’s what an agent is. You are an agent.
Now, ironically, in a lot of States, they call you a salesperson. Okay, whatever it is. But I look at you as a real estate agent. It is about them, and what is in their best interests, and their needs. Not about you, what you want, and you need. “I need listings, I need sales.” I get all that. You need to find motivated people that you can help and help them, and you’re going to make a lot of money. All right. So how do I advise them?
Three Keys to Giving Good Advice to Buyers or Sellers
There are three keys to giving good sound advice to a buyer and/or a seller.
Number one is Identify their Motivation.
You got to figure out what is it that they want? What do they want and why do they want it? If they want to buy a house, “Well I’m tired of renting. I want my own house. I want to be able to paint my own walls when I want, I want to be able to change up my floors. I want to be able to invest in making my house nicer and feel like I’m investing in my house. If I’m renting, it’s just driving me crazy because I can’t fix the house up. And I don’t want to put money into it because we’re here, and I feel like I’m not building equity and I’m not … People tell me that, ‘You need to buy a house.'” And so forth and so on.
“Well, is it the right time?” People who think about selling, “Well, is the market going to collapse? What’s going to happen?” Well, what do they want and why do they want it? “Well, I want a place to live. I want it to be mine. I want a place to own that is going to appreciate. I want the tax write off for the interest deduction.” Whatever their reason is, it’s important to understand what is their motivation, what is it they want.
“I want a house. I want to sell my house. I want to move. I want to get a bigger house. I want to downsize.” Whatever their motivation is, what do they want? And why do they want it?
Now, here’s who you help; motivated people. If somebody wants to move, they want to sell their house, they want to buy their house and it’s a legitimate reason, it may not be a financially advantageous reason for them. In other words, if they’re buying right now, interest rates are low. That’s an advantage. But prices are high, that’s a disadvantage. Prices could collapse, that’s a major risk that anybody that buys home now. Does that mean they should absolutely not buy? Well, it depends. It depends on what they want. Your number one responsibility is to find out what your client wants, why they want it.
And then number two, is just Serve Their Best Interest.
What’s good for them? Now, most people, believe it or not, do not buy a house as a primarily as a financial investment. They buy it as a place to live.
That’s what they want. So what if prices are high? Well, if they’re ready to buy, interest rates are good, they got the good job, they got the good credit, they can buy, let them buy a house. It is not your job to talk them out of and go like, “You shouldn’t buy a house now, it’s a bad financial decision.”, “Well, I’m not buying the house as a financial investment, not primarily.” Okay. If they’re looking at a house as a financial investment, “It’s going to cost you money and it ain’t going to make you money.” Now, if someday may be, but there’s no guarantee that, you just never know what’s going to happen. All right. So number two, serve their best interest.
And then number three is, Be a Problem Solver. Just look at that as your job, your job is to be a problem solver. So here’s the actual question that came from this from Tiffany Heredia in Phoenix. She’s like, “Kevin I’m in Phoenix. The market is hot over here. My sellers are great on the listing side. However, I’m having a terrible time trying to find a home. Would you recommend my clients sell at the peak and rent for a bit until the bubble pops and then look for a purchase that is not severely overpriced?”
Now, one, I really like the question. It was a great question, Tiffany. Beautiful question and I liked the reasoning behind what you’re saying. So she’s in a hot market, the Phoenix, Arizona market. As we’re recording this, prices are still high. There’s very low inventory. You put a house on the market, it is hard not to sell it. So sellers, they’re great. They list it, they’re going to sell it. But finding a house for them to buy is tough. So she says, “Should I recommend that they sell their house now at the peak?” When we know we’re at the peak. How do we know we’re at the peak? Because we’ve been through 12 years of economic expansion of housing markets going like this, it ain’t going to go on forever. With all of the stuff that’s happening in the economy … The real economy with unemployment, businesses shutting down, layoffs, homes in forbearance, all of that happening. This is going to turn.
Now, is it going to turn in November? Is it going to turn with the election? Is it going to turn in January and February? Is it going to turn in March and April when the first 12 months of forbearance has come to an end? When’s it going to turn? And the answer is we don’t know the exact day and hour, but it is going to happen. And when you’ve gone through a 12 year rise in home prices, you know that, that downturn is coming. When’s the peak? Nobody’s going to know the exact peak until after we passed it. You can’t know that. So have we passed it yet? I don’t know, but this is a good question. “So we’re at the peak, should we sell now?” Okay. Well, are you interested in selling it? Do you want to get out and get the most while your equity is at the highest and get all the cash out you can, and then rent for a bit until the bubble pops, and then look to purchase a home once the market sets coming down? That’s a pretty good plan. Pretty good plan.
But what if that’s not what they want to do? Then don’t try to get them to do that. Now, that may be an ideal scenario to help them leverage their equity, get out now, get the most money out. And then they’re going to be able to buy another house for less when the market corrects. Well, when’s that going to be? Six months from now? 12 months from now? 24 months from now? And if it starts going down, how long is it going to go down? There are some people who say it could be going down for years. So when they buy, do they wait just till it starts to go down? Do they wait until it goes to the bottom and rent for six years? I mean, probably not. What do they want? So here is the key. Here is how you put all this together. What do they want? You’re now saying, “How do I help them get what they want? And how do I solve their problem if they’re trying to decide, ‘What should we do?'” So here’s what you do. You educate them on their options.
This is how you solve the problem. You educate … Find out what they want, you educate them on, “Here’s the options. Here’s the pros and cons. Here’s the probabilities. Here’s what could happen. Here’s what could happen. Here’s when it could happen. We don’t know exactly, but this is what could happen.” And then once you’ve educated them on all the options, you can lay out the pros and cons and then you go like, “Okay.” Help them make a decision that gets them what they want and protects their best interests. So think of it this way. You are an information resource. You want to know everything you can about the market, about the economy, and all of that. You track the market statistics. I’ve got a video that I did on how to track market statistics. And I, in fact, gave you a free download for a way to track market statistics. I’ll put that link to that video in the description below so you can go check out that video on how to become the market expert, the real estate economist in your city, and with all your people.
Really, really powerful video, really important skill for you to have so that you become an information source for their decisions. That you are there to guide them in making the decision, not try to tell them, “Here’s what’s right, or what’s wrong.” You say, “Based on what you want, here are the options. Here’s the probabilities. If you go this way, this could happen. If you go this way, this could happen. Which way do you want to go?” Now, the last thing is, is once they decide they’re ready to go, like, “Okay, let’s do this. Let’s sell and then we’re going to rent and buy.” Or, “Let’s sell and we just want to buy it because interest rates are low. Let’s just do it downsize.” Or, “Upsize.” Or whatever. You are the captain of the ship. They need to know that you know what to do, that you can guide them. If you’re going to be a real estate agent, you owe it to your clients and yourself to become a professional who is competent enough at all of these processes.
That you can, one, understand what the options are involved, what’s going on in the market, what the pros and cons. To stay up on all that and then to know how to help them through the transaction. How do you help somebody not be homeless? Meaning how do you help them sell a house and then try to find a house. And go like, “Well, I can’t find a house.” How do you navigate all of that kind of stuff? You owe it to yourself to become a master of doing it. And most importantly, you owe it to your clients. I hope this video has been helpful for you. If it has, make sure you give it a thumbs up. If you’ve got questions, comments, post them down below. Subscribe to the channel here if you want more great training videos for real estate agents to help you get more yeses and more successes. And when you do, you can always expect, “Yes”.