3 Ways to Prepare for a Housing Shift

What would you do if you knew a global pandemic was coming? Something that would disrupt our economy and potentially disrupt the housing market and just change the way that real estate is done. So I know it sounds kind of silly. I'm recording this video August 6, 2020, in the midst of COVID and the pandemic. And the reason I posed the question that way is because I don't think this thing is going anywhere. You know, I don't watch a lot of news, I'm not reading a whole bunch of stuff. I'm not caught up in the 24 hour news cycle or on social media. I do check a few just data sources and apply logic to those data sources to come to the conclusion that like this virus doesn't really care that it's election year. I know there's like just theories going around that there's, you know, this is a hoax and it's linked to the election and there's a left and a right political side to this and, and there, there could be. I don't really get involved in politics. I don't think. You know, this is gonna sound horrible. I just don't think the leader of our country has much of an impact on, on much in, in my life. I do everything I can to wake up every morning, so do my best work, be the best husband I can, the best father, the best, you know, business person, and glorify God in everything I do. That's kind of just my deal. And I don't do it. I just don't do media and all that stuff. So what if you actually knew something was going to impact the flow of our economy and cause unemployment, like reset everything, you know, right now? What moves would you make in your business to sort of prepare yourself for something like this? And the reason I ask is because we are in what I think is a period of, you know, a little bit of a calm before the storm, don't get me wrong, in March, April, it was, it was pretty stormy. You know, there was some stuff, everyone was just sort of kind of like normalizing to this new order and this new way of doing business and just acting and just consumerism shifted and fear and you know, the whole mask wearing thing right now and should I go out or shouldn't I go out? And we want to be in a period of normalcy and go back to the way things were and they aren't the same. You know, I've been not impacted directly from COVID I know folks that have been and it's a real thing. And so I would really urge you if you think this is sort of politically based or you think there's a wrong or right side of this thing. It's, it just is what it is. And as business owners, we have to be able to just take into account what's going on. I do think there's going to be an economic, a bigger economic impact to this. Housing is super strong right now. The challenge I have for you is what would you do if you knew that a slowdown was coming? And there's three things that I'm doing to prepare for what that might look like. And this is not like I'm not, you know, a sky is falling type of business person. I'm generally, you know, out there in the future and I don't let, you know, current challenges get me down. And part of this is just being a realist. And what if this does, you know, stick around for longer than we expect? And what if it does have an impact on the housing market? And so anyway, so here are three things. You know, the first thing is to still be conservative with your cash and your expenses. So protect what you have. And this isn't the time, especially in, you know, probably a couple of really up months in most real estate markets. Like, we can't keep listings on the market. They're going within a few days. You know, we're having an. We had an amazing June, an amazing July. August is looking to be amazing. What if it doesn't continue to be amazing? You know, so we tend to our personality type. We tend to look at like everything with a positive lens. And when things are going well and we have this sort of bias towards positivity, it can be a dangerous combination because we think things can't possibly get bad. Right. So be conservative with your cash and expenses. Where can you get cash right now? You know, if you own a home, surely you should consider refinancing your home. I'm not a big debt guy. I do have debt only on my home. And if there ever was an opportunity to leverage your home as a source of future cash, this is that opportunity. And that's not telling you to take out a home equity line and buy a boat with it. It's just now is the time where you want to have cash and there's going to be opportunity. You may need the cash to sort of feed your business for a period of time or there may be opportunity to take advantage of, you know, and not in a horrible, evil, capitalistic kind of way. There just may be opportunity to Help someone who is less fortunate than you, who may have to dispose of an asset that you can capitalize on because you're in a position where you have cash to take advantage of that situation. So that's number one. Number two is to lean into your cadence, both in your business and personally. This is a big one, you know, and I went a little bit, well, not a little bit. I feel like I went a lot, a bit off the rails, you know, when things got real in mid March and you know, we had just gone on the week before everything hit and it was like, oh my gosh, this is like, I feel kind of stupid looking back on it. We went to Hawaii the first week in March and then when we came back, that's when everything was like, yeah, this is like the real deal. And you know, looking, looking back on it, I mean, probably should have known better. I think I just see things through that positive lens all the time and I'm like, this isn't probably as serious as they make it out to be. And that was super wrong. Obviously. When I think about cadence though, I went off the rails quite a bit. My morning routine suffered. My daily cadence suffered a little bit personally in the business. The business has a cadence. The business was still super intentional. The real estate team has a cadence around a 7am Tell me something good. Call a 7:30 rev up where we role play and pray and sort of prepare for the day. 8 to 11 is new business development. 1130 to 1130 or so is lead follow up. So that cadence was intact. We didn't really slip off of that at all. I just found myself personally staying up late, you know, waking up late. The kids were off school and they got off their calendar. I don't think we've still recovered from that crazy sort of shift in calendar. So what is your cadence? You know, have you gotten a little sloppy as the last couple months in real estate have been really strong? Have you gotten away from the things that, you know are going to lead you through something a little, you know, squishiness in the market or if our economy does take, you know, the housing economy, the housing market takes a little bit of a turn or you know, something happens to sort of, you know, shift consumers mindset around housing. Like I'm not smart enough to know all of that. I know inventory is super low. I know there's a reason to be bullish if you're in real estate. All that's well and good. I'm just wondering though if we've gotten away from Our routines away from the things that we know are going to lead to success, whatever the market is. And so there's encouragement there. You know, stick to your personal routines and also your personal wellness routines. Right. I went off the rails in my diet. I felt like, well, of course this is a good reason to eat potato chips. It's COVID 19, right? And that's not a good reason to eat potato chips ever. There's never a good reason to eat potato chips like five nights a week while you're, you know, binge watching. You know something better Call Saul on Netflix. Just not a good idea. So lean into your cadence and be consistent with it. And if you have team members, they're in a position where they're consumed in all of this media. They're consuming everything that's going on. They're on social media. They're sort of. Everyone is in the rut of. Even pre Covid, social media was challenging, right? And news is challenging and these like really high quality productions. You know, Netflix, you can go on there and you can just watch like the best stuff for hours, every night and never get through all the content. So that's always going to be there. It's always going to be a temptation. It's always going to take us off the cadence that we need to be really successful. And there's really nothing great on Netflix. Netflix happens for me between 10 and 12 at night. I need to be in bed, sleeping, eyes shut, 10 to 10, 15, so I can get up 6 to 6:15. So Netflix is never a good thing. It's always 10 to 12 at night. And it's, you know, it feels good in the moment. It takes me off of my cadence. My cadence starts with not my morning routine. My cadence starts with the time I go to bed. And so I was impacted quite a bit there. Number three is to be patient and watch your natural tendencies. I mentioned it earlier. We have a tendency to kind of be positive business builders in real estate. We're generally just positive, right? We're futuristics. If you've ever taken the strengths finder, I think it's called futuristic. And it's like we're always in the future, so we're always seeing past, like the current challenges, which on the one hand it's super helpful because it allows us to keep going when things are hard. On the other hand, it's challenging because things might be really tough and we're going to not really honor that. We're not going to, you know, listen to our team when they say they're struggling because of what's going on. We're just in the future going, come on, stay up, keep up with me in the future. And we tend to exhaust people. The other thing I would mention is, you know, in terms of watching your natural tendencies is that when sort of an entrepreneurial minded team leader or real estate agent, we tend to, when we're not sort of making progress in an area of our lives. So say we're not making progress in real estate, we tend to look for things to, to change or disrupt. Like the dopamine hit we get from switching CRMs or trying this lead source or what's another good example, you know, switching coaching programs and thinking. There's like this one's the, this is the reason I'm not getting success. Let me switch to this one. You know, we've had some of that. We've had people leave real estate B school thinking the grass is greener somewhere else. And we have, we've had even more people come into our world that know that what we teach is the, is the real stuff, the real stuff that's sustainable, that's going to last forever in your business. And so your natural tendencies, you know, how do you react when you're not sort of in momentum, when you're not growing your business and you feel like you're not making progress? Are you constantly chasing squirrels and getting distracted by shiny objects? Those are the momentum killers in your business. And if you don't watch yourself, you, you're going to be challenged to, you know, to grow in your business and your life and not only by your numbers, not only by selling more homes. You know, there's so many ways that we can measure growth and in real estate, traditional success, traditional ways of measuring growth is strictly by the number of homes you sell. Nobody is caring that you, you know, you, you had 100% increase in date nights this year over last year. Nobody cares that you had, you know, on average you have four times increase the amount of time you spend with your children during the week. You know, just quality time face to face with your children. Nobody's counting. In our industry, if you're emotionally well, like, hey, I have a 2.1, you know, x increase in my emotional wellness. You know, I've lost £20 and I'm running, you know, three to five miles, six days a week. Like I don't get awards for that. I didn't do that last year. This year I'm crushing it. I'm running like 25 to 30 miles a week. And it's like my therapy. Just getting out of my Neighborhood is a 1.22 mile loop and I'll do four loops of my neighborhood like five to six times a week. I never did that before, but do I get credit for it? You know? Will our real estate team sell less homes this year than last year? Yeah. Have I grown this year compared to last year? 100%. Because physically I'm in an amazing shape. My relationships with my children and my spouse are stronger than ever. I just signed up for seminary to get my masters of divinity and I'll be starting that this month. That's something I didn't do last year. But my real estate team is going to sell less houses, so I haven't grown. Right? So just be careful. Your natural tendency is to measure growth by number of homes you sell. What if you measured it on different things, you know, in your business and also outside your business? What if you measured it on the number of systems you implemented in your business? Right. All these core systems that we teach in real estate B school, some of our members, we encourage them. Maybe this isn't the year you increase your units because you don't have a foundation in your business. Your database is complete crap. You don't have a consultation like a sales process for buyers or sellers. You know, you don't have any. Like, your yard marking system is not strong. Your lead management, texting, email nurtures are crap. You know, you don't have an agent onboarding system or a recruiting system like, let's measure growth in the number of like foundational systems you install this year. And so our natural tendency is only to measure it by number of homes we sell. And it's not even to measure it by the number of dollars we have in the bank, our net worth. Ironically, nobody talks about that either. That's a whole nother episode I won't get into today. And so challenge yourself just to think of this. You know, be conservative with cash and expenses. This isn't the time to chase squirrels and get distracted by shiny objects. Lean into your cadence both personally and professionally. That new business development cadence, the lead follow up cadence and the cadence with, you know, building out systems in your business and, and then lastly to be patient and watch your natural tendencies. And I guess the fourth was, you know, just be careful how you measure growth. That would probably be the fourth since I kind of, I soapboxed on that a little bit. So much love and respect. We'll talk to you soon. Oh, I almost forgot. If you're at the point in your journey where you just know there's you need someone to come into your world that can help you navigate not only shifting markets, but there's so many things that are shifting right now for service providers. You know, we've got consumer shift, technology shift, the business model shift with iBuyers, and then just the economic shift that we talked about today. If you need someone to come into your world and come alongside you and come up with a really clear three year vision, break that down into one year plan 90 days, weeks, days. Like just map this whole thing out and get you on a really clear plan to be time and money free. That is the thing we work on and we do the best in real estate B school that there should be an action item here, a button where you can opt in for a free business growth strategy session. It's just a conversation with one of our coaches to see where you're at in your journey and what your next step is. And if we can help you, great. If we can't, it is a free coaching session. So make sure you take action on that and we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Business Freedom Podcast. If you're getting value from the podcast, would you please leave us a five star review and share it with others who might benefit from the content I'm sharing? And if you're ready to scale your real estate business sustainably and profitably, there are a couple options for you. If you're doing under 500,000 in annual GCI, our business foundations Program is for you. Head over to getbusinessfoundations.com that's getbusinessfoundations.com and learn how you can make the shift from overwhelmed real estate agent to true business owner. If you're doing more than 500,000 in annual Team GCI, there's our graduate program designed for top producers and team leaders who want to grow their team and scale their business. If that's you, go to realestatebschool.com and apply for a free business growth strategy session. No matter where you are in your business growth journey, we have the tools that systems, strategies, training and coaching to get you where you want to be. Remember, only you can create your future. So take action now.