3 Quick Housing Headlines & A Reminder of the American Promise

I'm telling you, there's so much noise in my email inbox when it comes to real estate. But because I have buyers and sellers to take care of, and frankly, today I have to deliver some American flags, made in the USA American flags, to some lucky drawing winners, I'm going to give you the quick breakdown of what you may have seen for noise too. And then we're going to have a little discussion about how to talk about real estate. And Frank, it's good for you to notice my earrings here because it's time to be bold and brave. And frankly, at my age, I guess I can go ahead and wear these things. So let's start off and talk about this report that just came out from the National Association of Realtors. I found it to be very interesting because everybody's using AI. Now, some people are using it for building processes, They're using it to automate parts of their business. Other people are using it to make memes and headshots. And y'all, I saw a headshot of me done with AI. That woman looks good, but it was not me. She didn't have nary a crow's foot, so it couldn't have been me. But what I'm curious about in the real estate side is what's going to happen next with how consumer behavior works, because I can see how REALTORS® are using AI, but how are our clients using it? Well, this report from the National Association of Realtors says that most of what buyers are using AI for— now notice they're looking at buyers. I'll point this out in just one second. There's 3 big things they notice that people are using it to estimate affordability, mortgage payments, and closing costs. They're using it to get general education and research about the process, and they're doing it to research neighborhoods, market trends, and property values. If you are a practicing realtor, Here's what I need you to understand. Your marketplace, you should look up like a buyer and ask these questions of whatever AI tool you're using, ChatGPT or Claude or Grok, and see what it comes up with. In fact, it'd be very wise to use all three because you get wildly different answers if you're on Elon's AI at Grok than you will if you're using the Sam Altman version. So ask these questions now. Then you gotta ask yourself, what is a buyer finding? Because estimating affordability, mortgage payments, and closing costs, there's something that many of these tools still aren't taking into account, and that is utility cost. You'll find on any mortgage payment site, PITI, in a previous video I was talking about the implications of data centers and what they're doing to projected and real utility costs in the areas where they're coming into being. That's something that can affect affordability. But is the AI tool gonna be thinking about the next stage of affordability? Not like a REALTOR® will. And also, you really should be talking to a lender because if there's anything that a REALTOR® knows, it's that if you get a mortgage number from an online lender, and I'm not naming any names, y'all can think of your own names, just don't say it in the comments, it might be ugly, but, those companies give wildly different numbers than you get from one of my local, local trusted lenders. I mean, the numbers are all over the place. Chat's probably not going to know the difference in what a locally owned bank can do versus a national online lender. So maybe people can get a ballpark there, but if you're buying a house and you happen to stumble up onto this video, please ask your local realtor who their local lender is, because y'all, it makes a staggering amount of financial difference. Now, the second thing people are looking for is general education and research about the home buying process. I hope that whatever the AI tool is giving them is state-specific because the process in North Carolina is wildly different than it is in New York and California, even South Carolina, 'cause I'm licensed in North and South Carolina. And frankly, South Carolina's got the way better process, North Carolina. I'm just saying, you know this. But when you start realizing that there are differences, not just in the process and the forms, but in the regulatory requirements and in the statutes. You probably should know that Chat and Claude and Perplexity might be giving you information for a different state that could impact your deposit money. This is another reason to make sure you're really, really local with your information. The third thing they're using it for is researching neighborhoods, market trends, and property values. Um, their information is often dated. Y'all know this, right? Because if I look at the neighborhood data around where I live, this area looks wildly different now from a demographic standpoint than it did 20 years ago. And I did some research with the AI tools. They don't like what the truth is here because it's not politically correct to even ask questions about it. So you start realizing that In this effort to be in one particular vein of thinking, there's information that's being withheld. And by the way, information is truly agnostic. It's just information. It's how you interpret it. And I don't really think it's fair that AI is trying to interpret things. So there's the big things that were found in the AI tools. I'll also point out that one of my buyers likes to use his AI tools to have to design— excuse me, to design an offer. And I saw this and I'm thinking, ah, that's not how it works in North Carolina, but okay. And so his information is conflicting with how things actually operate here with an operator who's been doing this for a long time, who knows I have fiduciary obligations to look out for his best interests. And you know that AI has no fiduciary obligations. To anybody? Okay, if you're a realtor, you need to be very clear about being a fiduciary with the people who have signed brokerage agreements with you and let them know what it means, because that's something AI can't replicate. Second big headline that I saw kind of cracked me up because I love the Golden Girls, and actually my husband is the biggest Golden Girls fan you'll ever meet. We even bought him some Golden Girls pajamas one year for Christmas because we're that kind of a thoughtful family. But this article was talking about older adults turning to Golden Girls housing Now, if you're wondering what that is because you're a young person who hasn't watched it in reruns— actually, young people are more likely to have watched it because they all love Betty White. You had 4 women living together in one house as a way to reduce cost and also to be sociable. Well, that's what they're talking about here, is the new marketplaces that are coming up for people to apply and get matched with somebody as a potential roommate. I think this is an interesting conversation because if you look at the history of this country, we did often have teachers that would live in teacherages or in boarding positions where they didn't have a lot of revenue. They might rent a room from somebody. It was a normal part of society for a long time. We've just gotten away from that in our world that says we need our own bedroom, our own bathroom. Everybody in the house needs their own bedroom, their own bathroom. We need 5,000. You don't need 5,000 square feet sometimes. So you realize that this is actually hearkening back to the way things used to operate, which kept us in a pretty good place for a community. Of course, in today's world, the immediate question is, well, who they roomin' with? How do you check 'em out? The services that were mentioned in this article talk about doing background checks and asking about preferences like smoking. Do you have friends over? Are you loud? Are you quiet? I think there's ways to manage this, and I think you actually have an opportunity here to rebuild some of the connections that were lost during COVID when the government told all of us that other humans were a bag of germs. You shouldn't hug them, touch them, or shake their hand. This might reintroduce a person who's starting out in their first job and can't afford an overpriced hedge fund apartment who now can live with somebody who's in the latter stages of their life and they don't have kids or grandkids around. Now they could have a young person in the house. It can be incredibly healthy. I just say as long as you have your insurance in place and you've done some background checking. So I liked this article, and I, I think it was in the New York Times, and that's why I couldn't show the whole article because I refused to pay for the New York Times, as many of you would probably guess if you know anything. And the third one is the real estate nerdy one, so I'll give you just a brief high level because most of y'all don't care. Zillow is arguing with Imred and Compass, and this is all about control of listings. Okay, these headlines keep coming and they're all very nerdy. This is why you should always follow James Dwiggin from NextHome, because he's the guy that can explain this better than anybody else. And if you follow Rob Hahn, very smart follow, but Rob has so much legal knowledge that Rob's explainers are about 47 pages long. So we love Rob, we love James. James is your easier one to understand. Now, of course, he's biased because he's the owner of a big real estate company, but I think he's right, so we can accept his bias. Now, here's what's happening. If you're a consumer and you want to sell your house, your expectation is that everybody in the marketplace can see it. Once upon a time, before the internet, Everybody seeing it meant all real estate agents could see your house through our Multiple Listing Service. When we saw your house, we could then tell the people we worked with about your house. Now, this happened whether it was in the book or it was in the internet system that we had that was controlled by the members of that system, which would be the realtors who paid the dues and belonged to that marketplace, because the MLS has always just been a marketplace. When the internet came along and many of the multiple listing services sold all of that data to the Zillows and the homes.coms and the realtor.coms and the Trulias, if you remember Trulia, they got gobbled up a while back, and all of these online marketplaces. Now, as a consumer, your expectation is not just that every realtor in the marketplace see it, but you expect the world to see it. Well, Zillow built a business model on the information that came from the marketplace that the people who paid to be a part of the marketplace created. So the marketplace belonged to the members because it was good for the people they serve. And then that marketplace sold access to all these other websites. Good, bad, or indifferent, that genie was out of the bottle. So what's happening right now is that Zillow's business model is very threatened by the fact that some companies want to pull part of their marketplace information out of that marketplace, which would keep it out of Zillow's hands. It's a very chicken and egg thing. So these lawsuits are Zillow fighting with the marketplace, fighting with the competitor who wants to pull stuff out. The question becomes this, and you go to the heart of all of this, as a real estate professional, who owns the data? I believe, as the person who is the fiduciary, back to our earlier conversation, for the people who want their house sold, that information belongs to me. I'm the one responsible for the accuracy of that information based on all the bylaws and the rules. And frankly, Geico, garbage in, garbage out. I'm the one responsible for the garbage. However, the minute I put that property into the system, which I've been asked and charged to do by the people who need their house sold, who would like it to be seen by the entire marketplace. I've now lost control of the data that I put into the marketplace, which was designed to be seen by only the people who pay to be a part of the marketplace, because the marketplace sold my information to the highest bidder, to all the highest bidders, and now it's out there. So if I, as the fiduciary for my sellers, keep my information back because I don't want it sold to the highest bidder on all these websites who then take it and run with it, I'm still responsible for the bad data. But if I don't get it out there syndicated, my sellers are the ones that are harmed. So at the heart of these control conversations is basically the money that comes from the data. Very little of these conversations has to do with the person at the heart of the data, which would be the homeowner who selected a fiduciary agent to do what's in their best interest. So what is in the best interest of the home seller who needs to have their house sold? Is it in their best interest to have it propagated everywhere so that we can't control what's out there? Or is it the best interest to have it only in one place, but it— the one place you picked said it's going to go everywhere? Unless you check a box, and we all know that it's, it's very tricky. Because here's an example, I have a house on the market where Zillow had bad information about that house. They got the taxes wrong at the county level. I can't touch the Zillow data, I can't fix it because that information didn't come from my information that went to the multiple listing, it came from the county tax authority where the sellers called and the county said, well, just tell Zillow to call us, in which case I laughed because haha. But I did reach out and got Zillow and they did reach out to fix that. But after they fixed the taxes, now the estimated mortgage payment is wrong, which is why to our earlier headline, your information is not always great when it comes from these algorithms and tools. But I, as the REALTOR® who's charged with taking care of them and being in their best interest, I can't reach the buyers who see it on the internet and see bad information and might just say, I don't know what's going on over here, but they go to the next house. So the technology wants the data from the practitioner, and then I can't touch the data again. So yes, these fights are real. The fights are going to keep happening. And by the way, if you're looking to buy or sell a house, it's probably wise to ask your agent where they stand in all of this, because you'll need to know if you're listing your property in front of a limited market or in front of a broad market, and you should have that choice, of course. But to date, in my 26 years of doing this full-time, I've never encountered a seller that wanted to have their house in front of a smaller audience. But maybe that's just the people I work with. Okay, I also want to tell y'all, because it's of course July 2nd when I'm making this video, we're 2 days away from America's 250th birthday. If you've never read this book, it's a great read. Who's Your Founding Father by David Fleming. It's the story that was not in your history books, y'all, about the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Mecklenburg County, North Carolina is where Charlotte is located now, but where I am in Cabarrus County used to be part of Mecklenburg County until we split off and became our own county after this moment. And in 1775, the ruffians, which is what they were referenced by Thomas Jefferson and his elite buddies in Virginia, the ruffians in this area wrote their own Declaration of Independence. Thank you. And horseback took it all the way to the Continental Congress where the North Carolina representative said, well, that's so nice, and they put it away. And none of those leaders had the kahunas that they had here in Mecklenburg County. This bunch of country boy ruffians living on the edge of society, because back then this was not a big fancy city. But they knew that there was no reason to let somebody else tell them how to live. And it started there, Mecklenburg County, May 20th, 1775. And then when Thomas Jefferson needed to write the Declaration of Independence so that he could get credit for everything— there are some books that talk about the possibility of plagiarism. I'm just going to say I need to I should have had that one sitting here because it's from the 1800s and it's hilarious. It's a whole book about how Thomas Jefferson was a plagiarist, and maybe I'll find a picture and put on my Instagram stories. But you start realizing that our founding fathers made a decision, however they got to it. We'll go ahead and give TJ a little bit of grace because he was only 33 at the time. Uh-uh. On July 4th, 2026, we're going to have to look back at 1776 and remember this. The men who signed that document put their lives on the line. They knew they were going to be considered traitors to the crown. They could have lost everything they ever had and been killed for putting a signature on a piece of paper. That, my friends, is what was done so that you could have the freedom to look at this video today, so that you would have the freedom to buy and sell real estate, because it wasn't available to you in any other place on Earth except in the new place that they created with this amazing experiment. And in those Federalist Papers, so please go back and read what the framers wrote. I know some of y'all been out of school for a while, but go pick up the Federalist Papers number 10, and you'll see the intense conversation about property. They were so intent on making sure that it was the central focus of those early documents because people who own their little piece of dirt are very, very stubborn. They are very hard to move. And if you wonder why there's such a push to keep people as tenants and renters, It's because renters can be moved, property owners cannot. They are very stubborn. They are very independent and they are liberty-minded. And my hope is that as we look at July 4th, we who are in real estate will understand that when we talk about the foundation of the American dream, this American dream is amazing. And we've got to get really bold about defending it when we look at the people that we serve and what they're asking us for when they call us. They want their little piece of dirt so that they can put 10 toes down and defend it, just like our framers did way back 250 years ago. And if you are the one who's willing to let the government come in and tell you what you can and can't do with your land, what they can and can't do through eminent domain and data centers and putting illegal surveillance up with these flock cameras, then you got to ask yourself what exactly you're trading off. As for me, I'm not willing to trade any of it. I still say taxation is theft. I'll be so glad when property taxes get eliminated so we can take that away from the, the fears that homeowners have so that people can stay put in their places forever. I love this country. I love y'all. Hit the bell to subscribe, grab your notifications, say something