Anthony: The market is slow. It’s so slow. We just got through talking in this training that was projected out, check out the camera, across our company about how the word slow is being taken out of context. It is slower than a frenzy, but it’s not slow. Did we just talk about that?

Speaker 1: Yes.

Anthony: It’s actually a hot market. We just talked about Jocelyn listed two properties in the last two weeks. One had seven offers and one had eleven.

Jocelyn: Correct.

Anthony: Okay. That, folks, is not a slow market. It’s not a slow market. What’s happening is people’s mindsets are getting screwed up because of the market being different than it was in the last two years. All of your realtors who said, “I’m sick of multiple offers, I can’t wait till there’s more inventory. I’m so tired of this. This market’s exhausting. I don’t have time to even go out and show homes,” you got your wish. It has happened, right, has it happened?

Speaker 1: Yes.

Anthony: It’s getting better. We’re still seeing multiple offers, but we’re also seeing some properties that aren’t selling. We’re in that in-between period as the market adjusts and slows down to a hot market. Now I know some of you watching, our friends on the West Coast, California, you might be thinking, “Yes, sorry, Anthony. It’s not a hot market, It’s more of a buyer’s market here,” I understand. You guys are a little bit further along in this adjustment in the market than we are on the East Coast, but even still, there’s still a lot of real estate selling on the West Coast all the time.

I know you guys are still seeing multiple offers. That was one takeaway from training was slow, the word slow being taken out of context. What was another takeaway?

Speaker 2: Placing, not price.

Anthony: Jocelyn talked about how she talks to sellers about how they’re going to place the home on the market at the right price. Instead of saying price it at this, it’s where are we going to place it. Do you want to add to that? [crosstalk] Come on up. Talk to the camera. This is one of our top agents in the whole company, folks, 500 agents and this is one of our best. Tell them.

Jocelyn: When talking to sellers, we want to talk about placing a home on the market, not pricing the home. Because today I might think we can price it at 550, but tomorrow might be better at 525 or 575. It all depends on what’s currently on the market. When you go on, what’s your competition? How are we placing you to make sure that you appear to be the better value?

Anthony: Makes perfect sense. I know when I sell properties that I personally buy that we flip, we always price on the lower side. I’m sorry. We place on the lower side so that we draw more people in. That was another takeaway. The other thing we talked about in this training that we did today, which by the way, the name of this training today was Crush the Market Shift part two. Part one was on June 1st. We reviewed many of the same things that we did in June, but we went over the data, we looked at the market, we looked at how inventory is rising.

We looked at how over the last few weeks there’s less homes being listed. We talked about how that affects buyers and how that affects sellers. We talked about educating. One of the things that I told everyone is every single day they should be paying attention to what’s going on in the market. How many homes are for sale in the market that you are working? Right now, off the top of your head, you should know. You should know that. I met someone, I was telling everyone on Saturday night, it’d be pretty funny if they watch this. This person said, “I’m going to wait to buy in Florida until the market crashes.”

For the market to crash, and it was a long conversation, but I said for it to crash we’d have to have a credit crisis and economic crisis and inventory would’ve to be dramatically higher. Do you know right now in the United States, we have about 800,000 homes for sale? In ’08 when the market was crashing, we had about 5 million homes for sale. Then I mentioned Massachusetts. I said, “Massachusetts, right now there’s about 9,700 homes for sale. In August of ’08, there were 47,000.” You can’t have a market crash and prices fall out unless you have an oversupply of inventory. You need to know these numbers off the top of your head. We just went over it. We reviewed our weekly market reports.

For those of you that are local, log onto marealestateupdates.com. Actually, even if you’re national, you should, because you could do it in your market. MA, for Mass, real estate updates.com. and you will see the charts and graphs that we put out publicly every week and our realtors follow. Should we give one last take away? What else did we talk about?

Speaker 3: Don’t be fooled by headlines.

Anthony: Don’t be fooled by headlines. July home sales are down. Massachusetts, they’re down 18%. We’re releasing our housing report today. A lot of people are going to see that’s going to get taken out of context. Why did that happen in July? Why were sales down in July? I will tell you, I will predict that you all listening nationally, they will not be down as much in August. I think they’ll be down, but not as much. Why was July worse? July was worse because rates spiked dramatically in mid to late May, early June. That made a lot of buyers pause. A lot of buyers got knocked out of the market.

Well, folks, there’s a whole crop of new buyers that have come in. I forgot to talk about the crop of new buyers that have come in. Not only there’s a crop of new buyers that have come into the market to buy, there’s also been a lot of buyers who have come back into the market. Didn’t we talk about that? Buyers that told you two months ago, “No, I’m going to rent.” Didn’t they talk about that? “I’m not paying this. I’m not doing this interest rate or I can’t afford it. I’m going to rent.” They went to rent. What happened to rentals? Rentals everywhere, we’re seeing multiple offers on rentals because a whole wave of people ran to rentals.

You need to be aware of this stuff. You need to be educated and able to talk to your buyers about it like this, like I’m doing with you on camera right now. Is that all, folks? Anything else? Did we have fun at training today?

Class: Yes.

Anthony: Thank you all.