YesTalk-212 - How to Keep Up with the Market Changes
11 Aug 2020 · 12 min
Kevin Ray Ward explains how agents can track market shifts by pulling 12 specific metrics from the local MLS each week instead of waiting for monthly reports. He separates macro trends from what actually matters in your neighborhood, and recommends a disciplined routine using a spreadsheet to spot changes faster.
Chapters
Welcome to Kevin Ward's Yes Talk for Realtors. This is Kevin Ward. The question of the week is how do you keep up with the market changes as a real estate agent? And a great question it is. It's actually the question from Ashley Moore that she commented on a previous earlier YouTube video that I did recently on how to the market forecast and what's happening. I'll put the link to that video below. But here's a question. How do you watch the market changes news mls, how do you stay up to date as a new agent? Well, it's a great question. And it doesn't matter whether you're a new agent or a seasoned agent, you have to know what's happening in your market. And because of the times, because of the uncertainty, because, because of the questions people have, they're just baiting on do I buy now? Do I not buy now? Should I sell now? Should I not sell now? Do we wait, what do we do? What's happening in the real estate market because there is so much turmoil, there's so much conversation, there's so much uncertainty. Now more than ever, your expertise is what people need. They do not need information from you, what they need is expertise from you. So you got to understand not only what's happening, but what to do about what is happening. So if you're wanting a lot of that, if you're really wanting to get advanced this and learn the strategies and everything like that, it's way beyond the scope of this video. Come join me at Agent Mastery Live, our next upcoming three day virtual event, agentmasterylive.com to check it out. But if you're wanting to understand how do you keep up with market changes, this video I'm going to tell you exactly how to do that and how to become a market expert, or what I call the real estate economist in your market. Now, there are two types of statistics that you want to pay attention to. One is the macro economy, the macro market, which is the broader market that becomes the whole United States, the global economy, the national economy, state economies and all of that. That's more of a macro look at what's happening around what's happening all over the place. And to keep up with market changes and statistics and what's happening like that, there's all kinds of resources that you can go to, from NAR statistics to keeping current matters to Zillow to Inman News and on and on and on. However, for micro statistics to want to know what's happening in your market, your backyard, in your home, for your prospects, for your clients, for your people. You want to pay attention to the micro statistics. What is happening in your market? If you're, if somebody's thinking about selling, how is what's happening right now going to affect the sale of their house and how much their house is worth, how much can they expect to sell for, how long is going to take and so forth. That is a micro look. And the best source for that is your local mls, your local multiple listing service. Now there's there, there are different softwares like broker metrics stuff where they can do more deep dive into it. But I'm going to share with you a very simple way that you every week can track what's happening your market. If you'll do this consistently, it will turn you into a market expert or the real estate economist in your city for all of your clients, your leads, your prospects and so forth. So here's what you want to do. You want to update and keep track of 12 weekly statistics. Now this is very, very important one, you got to track the statistics weekly, every single week, not monthly, every single week. Why? Because things are changing fast right now. And when things are changing fast, if I track the statistics monthly, it takes me, it takes six months to really get six data points so that I can see a trend. Three months, I only have three data points. But if I'm tracking it weekly in three months, instead of having three data points, I have 12 data points. Okay? So I can watch a trend and I can see things happening more quickly than if I'm tracking it monthly. So number one is you want to track statistics every single week. And I'm going to give you 12 statistics that I want you to track every single week. And I'm going to actually give you today a downloadable spreadsheet that you can download. And just all you got to do is pull the stats on your MLS and you plug them in. So it's a really simple process. I'll put the link down below to you download and go to yesmasters.com mastermind market stats and you can download this free spreadsheet that simply is a one year weekly tracker. And you just put the numbers in for that week. You can start where you are, put the numbers in and it's going to start tracking these numbers for you and so you can see trends. So Here are the 12 weekly statistics that you're going to track. Number one, new listings. How many new listings came on the market in the last week? Number two, total active listings on the market right now. Okay, how Many total active listings are on the market. What is the active inventory right now? Number three, how many new pendings, how many new pending sales, how many properties went under contract in the last week? So this lets you see how fast homes are selling. Okay. Number four is how many expired and canceled listings. In other words, how many listings went off the market and the listing agreement with that agent did not sell, done off. So expired and canceled listings. And then the next one is similar to that, but it's your off market and withdrawn listings, which means they're probably still with the same agent, but they just pulled it off the market. So between your expired and canceled listings, which is one column, and then you're off market, temporarily off market and withdrawn properties that have been taken off the market for whatever reason, that lets you see kind of what's happening on the back end of people putting their homes on the market. Are they selling new pendings or are they coming out? How many of them are actually just being pulled off the market either because the agent failed Sellers changed their mind? Sellers are waiting. Whatever it is, we don't know, but we're tracking that. And then the next statistic is the number of closings that happened this last week. Okay, this you're doing this week to week and you got to do the same day every single week. So you want to do it like every Sunday afternoon or every Sunday night or every Monday or every Friday whenever you want to do it. But it consistency is the key here. You just put in your calendar and every week I'm going to spend about 30 minutes to go through and pull these statistics and will not take you that long once you get used to doing it. But it's important that you do it every week so that you're staying on top of what is actually happening. So this is a great consistent habit. So that every week I'm staying on top of what's happening on the market and every week, because I put it in the spreadsheet, I'm seeing the trends, I'm seeing are there more listings coming to the market? Now is inventory going up? If there's more listings coming on but inventory is going down or staying the same, that means what's coming on is still selling average days on the market, I'm going to get to those. So the rest of this, Let me get to the rest of the stats here. So next is your average days on the market. What is the average days on the market? Next is your average list price. And then the next statistic is the average sale price. Which means the actual price sold for. So average list price, average sales price. Then the next column is the list price to sell price ratio. List price to sell price ratio. Okay. Where you take the list price divided by the sales price, right? And that gives you a list price to sell price ratio. And then how many price reductions happened in the last week? Now this is a symbol of how people are thinking. Are they getting desperate homes not selling and they're getting frustrated so they're reducing the price. How many price reductions did we have in the last week? And then the final one is how many weeks of inventory are there? And these are formulas in the spreadsheet that we'll have built in for you so that the list price, sell price ratio, that's built in for you automatically in the spreadsheet that you're going to download for that free download. And the how many weeks inventory, that's also that that formula would be built in. So when you put in the other data points, it will automatically, automatically calculate that for you so that you'll do it. And at the very end of it, it is going to have the weekly, at the very end of the spreadsheet, it's going to have the weekly, the year to date weekly average for each of those, those, each of these data sets. Okay? So if you start tracking that, then every week I can watch what's happening. The average days on the market, what's happening? Aver price, average list price, sale price ratio, is that changing? How many price reductions are happening? What is the, the total week? How many weeks of inventory do we have on the market? Is it going up, is it going down? Are the total actives going up or they're going down? And it will allow you to see. So whenever a buyer asks what's happening, as sellers ask what's happening in the market, Average days in the market is going up, home prices are starting to drop, the sales prices are starting to drop. What more price reductions, more expires, Whatever is happening. When you see some of the big things that are be happening. When you see a flood of inventory and all of a sudden you see a bunch of new listings coming on the market and then inventory starts going up, you know something is happening, supply is going up. And if total active listings is going up, supply is going up. And that means there's not a demand to keep that, those properties coming on. Properties are selling when there's, they're not selling as fast. Now you got a problem of increased supply. Prices are going to start dropping. That's bad for sellers, good for buyers. These are the kind of things that you want to be watching. And make sure you're doing this every week because weekly lets you see the trends faster. Now, one couple of recommendations that I make. One is that you do this in your entire market metro area. So if you do like, if you live in a big city, I want to just do the whole thing. Like I live in Los Angeles, so I want to do the entire LA metro area. Okay. And I'm not doing the entire MLS because our entire MLS covers almost all of Southern California, which is way too big of a market. You can, but it's going to give you more of a macro look than the micro. So Los Angeles, what's happening in the greater Los Angeles area? I'm not going to include areas that are like in the high desert, just because it's a totally different world than the city of Los Angeles. But again, your market depends on what it is. So if you live in Dallas Fort Worth, where I sold real estate, you might do all of DFW and then whatever is your core market area. So, like, I'm in Los Angeles, but I live in the South Bay of Los Angeles, California. So that south bay has about 10 or 12 cities. And that would be what I would consider my core market if I was actively selling today. So I'm going to do a more of a micro look at just what's happening in the South Bay. Now, you can also do it by actual individual, a little city or community if you want to do that. You can do as many of these as you want to get, as complicated, as granular as you want to get. But the most important thing is that you're doing this weekly and consistently, whether you're doing it on one market area or you're doing it breaking it down, where you're doing 10 of these a week. Whatever you decide to do is fine as long as it is consistent. So it will actually help you understand the market, have more expertise so you can give better information and better guidance to your clients, to your prospects that are making decisions about what is best for for them. And when you have that kind of information, when you kind of have that kind of knowledge on the tip of your tongue, you have that kind of expertise and you can share with them exactly what you're doing. People will always want to work with you, so get your free download. The link again is down below. Yesmasters.com Marketstats if you want more training on how do you use market stats, how do you use the parts happening in the market and strategies and skills. Then join me for our upcoming three day live virtual event, Agent Mastery Live. Go to agentmasterylive.com get your early bird tickets right now as I'm recording this as this is being published, you got early bird tickets still available. Make sure you get on that as quickly as possible. Get this download. It's free. You can start using it right away and learn and understand what's happening your market and you'll always be able to expect yes hey there, it's Kevin.
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