In today’s world of dealing with unproductive Internet leads, it is time to cultivate the tried and true methods of yesteryear, the referral. A referral is often a warm lead from a trusted source. But have you ever sent a referral to another broker, and then never heard from that broker again? Join the club. What is your conversion rate on getting or giving referrals? With over 2500 referrals given each day in the US between agents, you may want to focus on building a stream of income from this underserved resource. But when you are actively giving or receiving referrals, keeping track of status might be a challenge. The communication of status and updates might be consistent or ,all too often, you never hear what the status is. Did the client have a good experience? Did the referral result in a sale? With the success or failure of the…
A lack of housing supply is a serious issue in the U.S. It has put upward pressure on home prices and made buying prohibitively expensive for many. That said, new housing units are being constructed. We have a long way to go before the nation’s housing shortage is fully addressed, but it’s worth recognizing the progress. To find out where these new homes are being built, we analyzed the latest housing data and found that recently built houses aren’t particularly common in the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. Here's what else we found. Across the nation’s 50 largest metros, 1.48 million housing units were built from 2020 through 2022. Put another way, just 1.95% of these metros’ 75.89 million housing units were built from 2020 through 2022. Recently built housing units make up the largest share of homes in three South metros — Austin, Nashville, and San Antonio. In these metros, 5.97%,…
The buzzwords of today’s digital age are ‘AI’ and ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ These excite some and strike fear into others. Yet whatever your position, this Hard Trend is undeniable and will shape the future of your business or organization in some way. Applications like ChatGPT, deep data algorithms, and others are changing the face of work and how we approach business practices at an unprecedented speed. So what does that mean for the roles we have at work? Better yet, how do employers acquire talent with the skills necessary to keep operations progressing into the future? And finally, how do employees adapt when many of the tasks they are used to completing are being transformed by AI? AI Is Moving Fast Organizations and employees alike find comfort in their tried-and-true operations, but the business world is never constant — change is the only constant. According to a recent report completed by Goldman Sachs, 60% of the…
We all know that you can’t fight the FED, but when the FED doesn’t do what people want them to do, the markets are the ones that respond! We spoke a couple of weeks ago about wishing certain people would just keep their mouths shut until AFTER certain actions do or don’t happen. However, we got to see what happens when people get too far out in front of a story, or just downright say things that aren’t true. Here are a few issues that were front and center. • The FED didn’t cut rates. • Inflation isn’t going lower. • Most of the jobs created were part-time jobs. • The actual number of full-time workers has gone down. • Mortgage rates didn’t go to 5% in March. • Home prices continue to rise. • What happens when CPI/PPI show stress and your leadership says “Don’t” and they DO? • …
Luxury sales are outperforming partly because elevated mortgage rates aren’t a deterrent for many luxury buyers, as a record 47% of luxury homes were bought in cash at the start of 2024 The median-priced U.S. luxury home sold for a record $1,225,000 in the first quarter, up 8.7% from a year earlier, according to a new report from Redfin (redfin.com), the technology-powered real estate brokerage. Prices of non-luxury homes rose at roughly half the pace; they were up 4.6% to a median of $345,000, also a record high. Redfin defines luxury homes as those estimated to be in the top 5% of their respective metro area based on market value, and non-luxury homes as those estimated to be in the 35th-65th percentile based on market value. Luxury prices are rising largely because demand for high-end homes has held up better than demand for middle-of-the-road homes. Sales of luxury homes are…
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