Summary

If you want to win in a changing real estate market, these are the 2 Most Important Market Stats to track EVERY WEEK.

1. Total number of active listings in your market right now. How many homes are on the market today? Tracking this every week lets you see trends in supply and demand over time.
2. Number of price reductions in your market every single week. How many price reductions were there in your entire market in the last seven days? Also break it down into the micro market level of individual suburbs, towns, or cities.

When you know what’s happening in your market, you gain confidence & knowledge. This helps you communicate better as you’re marketing to your database, doing lead generation, and handling pricing objections.

If you want more winning strategies for adding 2-3 more deals every month, I’d like to invite you to join me for my FREE live webclass called, How to Win in a Changing Market. Register for free HERE

Full Transcript

What’s happening to the market? It’s happening. It’s changing right now. The tsunami is here. The storm is here. And number one, most of you are not ready. Number two, most of you do not know how it is changing. And number three, you’re taking everybody else’s word for it. Stop taking everybody else’s word. 

You need to know what’s happening, not only in the market, you need to know what’s happening in your real estate market, so you’re prepared for it so you can speak with credibility and certainty when you’re talking to clients.

Hey, there. It’s your coach, 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. And today, we’re going to talk about exactly what’s happening in the market, but I want to do more than just talk about it. I am going to equip you and empower you so that you can stay on top of the market in ways that other real estate agents don’t and can’t. 

And the beauty of it is it’s extremely simple. So I’m going to give you the best, fastest, and easiest way to know exactly what changes are happening in your real estate market right now, today and what to do with it, what to do with it in both your marketing and in building credibility and trust with buyers and sellers that you are talking to.

So let’s just break into this. 

How do I know what is actually happening in the market? 

Well, the answer is you need to follow market statistics. You need to know what’s actually happening. The problem is there’s too much statistics to follow and we tend to go get it from somebody else, some other source, and it’s out of date, or it’s the entire country. It’s not your hyper-local market, so that you can know, have the absolute certainty of what’s happening and what to do about it. So I’m going to walk you through a process that you can do every single week that will very quickly give you a feel for what’s happening in the market.

Now, I want you to understand. This is also a long-play game. So this is both short-term and long-term. It is not something that’s going to help you today in the immediate future as much as it will over time when you do this consistently every week. 

The problem is, for most of you, is you don’t actually know what’s happening in the market. And so when somebody says, “So how’s the market? Is this a good time to buy or sell? What’s actually happening in the market?” When you’re sitting there on a listing presentation and you’re talking to a seller and they go like, “Yeah, well, we think that the market’s still going to be okay. It’s going to do this. It’s going to do this. We’re hearing it’s not really… prices are not going to go down. What… so we don’t want to do this. We don’t want to reduce our price.” If you don’t know what’s actually happening, then you are not equipped with the knowledge of what to do. And without the knowledge, you also don’t have the certainty.

So this is generally a protocol of this is something that you do every single week to give you that certainty and so forth. So this is a weekly… you’re going to do it as a weekly report. Okay? This is something you’re going to do every week as a weekly report. 

I am going to give you two statistics and three columns on a spreadsheet you are going to create that’s going to give you the fastest way to know what’s happening in your market. The problem with most market stats is they track lagging indicators, not leading indicators. 

So there are two leading indicators that will show you the most, the quickest, the fastest. They will show you what’s actually changing in the market. Okay? There are two.

Top 2 Market Indicators

1. Number one is a snapshot of the total number of active listings in your market right now. What is the total number of active listings in your market right now today, a snapshot in time. How many homes are on the market today? 

And then you compare that week after week after week after week, and you watch what is happening to the number of total active listings because what this gives you is the total supply. It also, as you track it over time, it lets you see what’s happening in supply and demand because what we’re seeing right now is inventory is zooming through the roof in so many markets.

Long Beach, California, in the last four months, inventory has nearly tripled. In Los Angeles, inventory has nearly doubled in the last 90 days. In San Bernardino, California, inventory has more than tripled. In Phoenix, inventory’s tripled in the last four months. In Las Vegas, inventory has already tripled in Las Vegas. 

Places all across the country, we’re seeing these massive increases of inventory, houses that are coming on the market and now, you have more houses coming on the market and fewer houses coming off the market. And if you want the fastest way to know it, you just simply one day a week, same day, every Monday, you just set it in your calendar, a reminder. “I just need to go see what is the total active listings in my market.”

Now, you can do both the entire market, all of Las Vegas, and then you can break it down and go like, “Okay, what about North Las Vegas? What about Henderson? What about Summerlin, Summerlin South?” Different areas and you can break it all down. Lake Las Vegas. I can break it down by market and see the flow and the changes that are happening.

The thing about this is you want to do it every single week. Remember, it’s got to be weekly, weekly because it gives you a feel faster for the change. If you just do it once a month, it takes you four to six months before you can really see a trend. If you just go from one month to the next month and it jumps or it drops, it doesn’t really give you a trend. But if you’re doing it weekly and you see a consistent move, weekly gives you faster feedback on how long this happened.

Now, what I’m going to tell you is you need to put this in your calendar. You need to do it every week. You need to do it for six weeks and you start seeing trends. Do this for six months, your mind is going to be blown at what will happen.

2. Now, there is one more metric that you want to look at and that is the number of price reductions that are happening every single week in your market. Again, you can break it down by the entire overall macro market and also, the micro market of individual suburbs or towns or cities in your market.

So these are literally the only two stats you need to look at if you want to see the fastest leading indicators of what the future is going to bring with the housing market because when inventory is going up, supply going up, going up, going up, it tells you supply is going up. Demand is going down. If it stays the same, then it tells you that the supply and demand is balanced. Okay? 

Now, over time there are different metrics like days on market and list price, sale price ratio, all those kinds of things, and just actual prices of homes that will tell you long-term, what is the result of all this happening? But those are lagging indicators of changes in the market. This is where you get the first look.

Tracking Market Stats On A Spreadsheet

So here’s what I’m going to recommend that you do is you create a spreadsheet, okay? You create a spreadsheet and this just is okay, this week. Okay? Here’s what is happening this week and then every week on Monday. So if you go, “Okay, so this is August the 1st, then August the 8th, and then August the 15th.” I’m going to go in every week and I’m going to do it.

Now, the really critical thing to understand here. Active listings, the only time you could just see the total number of active listings in any moment is at that moment. You cannot go back. I’m not aware of any MLS in North America where you can actually go back to June, July 1st or June 1st or April 1st and see what was the total active inventory on a particular day at a particular given time. I’m not aware. If you are aware of a way to do that, put it in the comments because that’d be great to know. I’d love to see how to do that.

But I’ve coached coaching members all over the country, all over North America, and I’ve not seen anyone that can go back and get just a snapshot in time of the total active listings six months ago at a specific moment. New listings, all that, yes. But the total, just a snapshot of Active, you need to do it in the moment. So you need to do this every week.

So August 1st, I go in there and I look and I say, “Okay, there’s 72 listings on August 1st.” Next week, I go back, “Ah, there’s 78 listings on August 5th.” The next week, there’s 84 listings. Now, what we’re seeing is sometimes, you’ll see ups and downs. That’s normal. But what you’ll see is over time, you’ll see trends once you’ve tracked this week after week after week. 

And what we’re seeing is right now happening as you’re going forward in three or four months, what we have seen in a lot of the markets in California, in Nevada, in Phoenix, and I’m hearing it all across the country. Those are some that I’m aware of specifically is we are seeing literally two to three times the inventory and price reductions even more powerful every week. How many price reductions were there in my entire market in the last seven days?

Now, if you go back and I’ve had coaching members that are tracking this back since January, February, March, and here’s what they were seeing in specific towns. You might see, okay, two price reductions, three price reductions, four price reductions, two price reductions. And then all of a sudden, what we saw from March and April to July and August is all of a sudden, you’re seeing 48 price reductions, 42 price reductions, 49 price reductions. And we are literally seeing sometimes, 5x to 10x or more price reductions than they were doing earlier this year.

Now, the best is if you’ve already been tracking this, that would be great. You can actually go back now and you can go back in your MLS and you can go back and do seven-day chunks. Every seven days, how many price reductions were done? This one you can go back and see in the past. This one you have to track in the moment on the spot. 

But when you start doing this and then you sit down with the seller and they’re like, “Yeah, we think X, Y, and Z.” And you show them, “Hey, let me show you what’s happening in our greater market area, and let me show what’s happening in your town.

In your town, inventory has more than tripled in the last four months, in the last 90 days, in the last 60 days. Price reductions have 5x-ed, have 10x-ed. What does that tell you? It tells you that more homes are coming on the market than are selling. That means supply is going up. Demand is going down. What happens when supply goes up, demand goes down? Prices follow. Okay?

So a couple things for you to take away from this. 

Number one, if this is happening in your market and it’s happening in a lot of the markets right now across the country. In the summer of 2022, we are seeing inventory starting to go up and price reductions starting to dramatically increase. This is a leading indicator that prices are about to start dropping. Okay? Some of your markets, you’re already seeing prices drop. Some, you’re going, “Yeah, prices are still holding firm,” and all the economists, they’re saying housing prices are going to stay steady. Not when you have this happening. Okay? It’s simple math.

And so this is why if you know what’s happening in your market, it does two things. Number one, it gives you confidence. Number two, it gives you answers because you have knowledge. Knowledge gives you certainty, and it gives you answers.

Now, how do you use this? Use this in communicating. You can use it with your personal circle in your marketing to your database. You can also use it in your conversations and lead generation and in conversations at listing appointments as a way of handling objections, when they’re wanting to overprice it, if you’re seeing this happening in your market.

So here’s my question for you to put in the comments. What do you already see happening in the market, in your market? Are you seeing inventory go up? Now, the reality is you probably don’t really know. You have an impression, but when you start tracking this, you’re going to be shocked. It’s like, “Wow,” just having your finger on the pulse of the market, the confidence and certainty that gives you in your conversations with buyers, with sellers at helping you have confidence, so they have confidence to trust you and to hire you.

If you have any thoughts or comments on it, make sure you put those in the comments below. If you liked the video, give it a thumbs up. If you’re new here, subscribe to the channel, and I’ll see you on the next video.