Keith Robinson briefs NextHome agents on pandemic strategy: seven webinars that week, virtual home buying guides, and daily market reports. He expects a short, steep recession, flags mortgage liquidity stress from forbearance, and urges agents to contact their databases about updated pre-approvals.
Questions this video answers
Every Monday at 12:00 Pacific (he states he will do a Monday update at 12:00 Pacific).
About seven webinars (he references "something like seven webinars" that week).
Chapters
This Monday update, I'll be doing every Monday at 12:00 clock Pacific. This is sort of my time just carved out to talk to you about what's been going on. I know we have a ton of content that's coming your direction. Some of this will be a repeat. If you've been on every single webinar, you're like, oh, I've heard this before, but it might be nuanced or different or things are so dynamic and changing. I just wanted to have a time carved out on Monday to just talk to everybody. And we'll go over the whole webinar schedule for this week and going forward. And I also want this to be interactive. I'm going to ask you guys questions on what do you want to see more of, what do you want to see less of? Are we doing too much? Are we not doing enough? Well, if we're not doing enough from a webinar standpoint, I don't know what to say. We're giving you all we all we got, but we will get feedback from you as well. So audio is good. There are no cameras again on this one. So I'm just going to fire it up and get rolling because my clock says it's 1202 here in California. So first thing I want to talk about is our strategy. And a lot of companies have reacted to this and most real estate franchisors and companies, everyone's reacting in different ways. Our strategic choice was to hyper focus on communication, as you can probably tell, due to people saying that they talk to me more than they talk to their significant others. I don't know any other way to do it in times like this other than to over communicate and just get massive amounts of information coming your direction. And if we can help some of you process some of this, then that's a win. We really, I believe very deeply that this is going to be pretty steep. We are experiencing, we will experience a recession. This will be a pretty steep down, but it will be short. And on the other side of it, the agents and companies that are the most well informed, the most well inspired, the most well encouraged will take the most action on the other side of this. And there can be a benefit that happens from that. So our strategy has been to have as many webinars as we deem appropriate. And I'm going to ask you guys some questions on which formats you like and which might make sense. But we want to over communicate and we want to be giving you all the information that we can. And that has been Our strategy, we have the resources that we have just like any other company. And so that might mean some things that other companies are putting out, like, you know, really cool social media imagery or whatever. We're a little slower on that. And that's just because we've only got so many humans trying to crank out as much content as humanly possible. So that's been our strategy, that is our approach, that will continue to be our approach because that's what we believe is the right thing to do. We also are crafting content for all layers. So there's content some that all of you don't even see that's just for broker owners because they're dealing with some different things maybe than an agent. We're also doing agent population stuff and then we're also doing consumer facing stuff. We did our first one Friday. I'll give you more information on that as well. But that is all of the stuff we have coming down the pipe. This is this week's webinar schedule and there's even a few that are broker only that aren't on here. So we have something like seven webinars and a few scheduled Facebook lives that we have just in this week alone. If you'd help me out in the questions tab, everyone can respond if you want, but it'll take me a while to read through them. But give me your feedback. Are we doing too much just right or not enough when it comes to the webinar content, I really would love to know your thoughts and feelings on this and especially things like Wednesday. We want that to be John o' Leary, who spoke at our our conference in New Orleans. Invite your database to that. It's a great touch. It's a perfect way, you know, to reach out to your clients and to provide value for them. And then the Friday, the economic impact, that's one James and I are doing every Friday. I'm an economics nerd, so I am happy to sort of share our thoughts. We did one on Friday. It's been pretty well received. I emailed that to you guys over the weekend with the link. If you haven't listened to it yet, go back and listen to it. If you haven't shared it yet, share it with your clients. And I'm actually at the end of this gonna talk to you a little bit about how to talk to your sphere of influence about it. So this is our schedule for this week. I did a Facebook Live to the general closed group of NextHome on Sunday. I'll try to do that every Sunday with all the links for you. We know there's a lot going on and some of you are shelter in place, Bill, and you've got plenty of time to watch webinars and that's awes some of you. It's business as usual, but with extra safety precautions. So maybe you don't have as much time. But we really want to know. It looks like for the most part we are doing a good job. All right. Appreciate it. Awesome. Thank you for that feedback. I really, really do appreciate it. It's a lot of work, but y' all are worth it. And it's what's appropriate at this time. So take a look at our schedule. Do carve out the time. Most importantly, I really want you using these client invitation ones, these ones that are appropriate for the masses to push these out to your database. It's content that we're creating and developing as much as possible so that you are that voice in your local marketplace. All right. We are tinkering. Most remote working systems are having trouble. Okay. So I just want you I know that if you've been on webinars, we're really good at this. We already were doing more webinars than a lot of companies companies and the audio issues are struggling. And so we're tinkering with we're actually going to try this Friday's Consumer Facing one for your clients. We're going to try it as a zoom. We got time to play with it this week and learn the tool a little bit better. And then James and I will be doing this Friday as a zoom. And we're tinkering with both in general, we think gotowebinar is better for bigger groups, but it seems to be having real load issues with, you know, especially during the day, these prime time, like 10am Pacific, noon Pacific, when everybody's kind of piling in to go to meeting and go to webinar. We seem to be having audio and video issues pretty consistently, especially on the bigger webinars. So we're gonna test zoom on a bigger webinar. And I guess I'm telling you all this just to be aware that we might be sending you to different places at different times. But here it's just more information for you to have take a look at the links. Things could be a little different than if you were looking say earlier, I guess earlier this week because it's Monday, but earlier last week. Share your ideas. I mentioned before that our strategy is to be highly communicative and design content. We do want you to share Your ideas that they should go to marketing nexthome.com marketingexthome.com we are committed to still cranking out social media content as well. But it's really, you guys see something cool all the time and we might not see it in time because we're either building a webinar, doing a webinar, writing the email to send after the webinar, or something else. So share your stuff with that you see that you like. With marketingexthome.com just do us one huge favor. It needs to be as generic as possible. There are 450 different locations. We have thousands and thousands of agents. We can't bog down marketing with a specific request or it's just going to take time to do a specific request to design a marketing piece for the individual. What we're trying to do is leave as much space available for designing ubiquitous content that will work for everyone all across the country. So some of those and I'm going to show you some examples of what we put out. But our marketing team is, is mighty. They are all working extra and over the amount of work that it takes to do this many webinars and this high level of communication is tremendous. And you know, James and I and Emory and others, we kind of just get to show up when the lights go on and we get a lot of the emails thanking us. There is absolutely no way we could do it without the support from the marketing team. So be a little patient with them and if you have general social media content that you think would be great for us to create, send it to them. We'll get it in the queue. We're working on some things, maybe some extra hours for some of the marketing team where they have that I don't know. Or also outsourcing some so that we can get more social content created more quickly. Just do us a favor. Send the more generic stuff that you think would have high value and that you will use. And ubiquitous is the is some of your favorite words. Mine too. All right, here are some resources that we've created. We've created Luke's activity page. We've created the daily market activity report. I'm going to show you that virtual home buying process. In fact, let me just show you some of these. So this is designed to answer the question, hey, hasn't the market completely stopped? You might want to pull this up especially look, if you're at a shelter in place where real estate was deemed non essential, might not be the right one for you to use. But if you are one of the states where it's not shelter in place at all. Or if it is shelter in place but real estate is deemed essential. You could use this, for example, as a way to. As a way to communicate subtly or not so subtly that the market hasn't totally slowed down. So this is something that we were asked to create. We created it, we push it out. It's out there and available for you right now. Virtual home buying process. This is something again, we know that this has been out there in the social ether and so that is why we created these for you. Again, these are all built and ready for you to use with Abandoned. We have some others too. When I push out the recording link for this to everybody, we'll make sure we include links to all of the current social media content that is specific and pertains to this. I'm going to clean out just a few of these. Let's see. Oh yeah, where is this located? We'll push it out on a link. I promise. Promise we will. Or Petcha if you can message me. Maybe actually Petcha, if you're on, which I think you are, you'll put it in the chat the link. That would be awesome. Maybe they can copy and paste. But we will also put it in the email as well. There was one comment is can we do webinars just to communicate calm the nervous buyer currently under contract when the rules keep changing? Isabel, that's a great one. That's kind of what we're hoping the Friday one that James and I are doing. We aren't doom and gloom. We also aren't just saying everything's fine. We're trying to clearly articulate how things have changed and moved. So that really is one that we are hoping that by hearing from James and I without a lot of fear, appropriate concern, but not a lot of fear, we are aware, etc. So hopefully that is what we are trying to do with that. Isabel, take a listen to it. If you dug it and it works for you, great. If not, then we could do something else that's maybe a more timely update. Okay. For Wednesday, Good question. Is appropriate for clients currently under contract preparing to close or not relevant to them. Wednesdays John o' Leary webinar He's. He has just got an amazing life story. I think it's. It's not real estate specific. It's just a message that we could all use to hear right now that, you know, it's hard right now and things are tough to varying degrees for everybody. But this too shall Pass. And your mindset and your approach matters as much as the external. As the external items. Petra gave me an update. It's going live in the Internet in a little bit. We will make sure you get a link to these social media images and others in the email that we push out after this. All right, cool. All right, let's take a look at some numbers. I'll report these numbers every week. Not to create panic and fear, but just to take a snapshot on a weekly basis of where we are here. And I'm just using China as a baseline because they started first. As most of you know, we surpassed China from a count. I'll give some context to this. Yes, the US is now has the most cases of coronavirus in the world. So but let's one, we can't go into lockdown the way China went into lockdown. We just don't have a government that's set up that way. So that is one contributing factor. A lot of people want to compare us to Italy, but Italy is just a much smaller country. And so there's not really a true comparative to see sort of how we're doing. I don't want to act like this is good news. There are thousands of people getting sick and there are also a lot of those people that were already sick. Remember, we're behind on our testing. So when you see these new cases, that doesn't mean they just got sick today. These aren't people who just got sick. They just got tested. And New York is doing the most testing. That's why you see the biggest numbers in New York. I think if everywhere we're testing at the robust level that New York is, we would see even bigger numbers. There are people who are sick that have this, that haven't been tested. If you look at the curve, I'm kind of a charts and graph nerd. It's because of my, my love of economics. We are seeing a decrease in the rate of increase. Okay. I don't mean to. I'm not trying to paint this graph as a good thing. It isn't. I hope everybody stops getting sick tomorrow. But what usually happens is there is a sort of a bell curve where things start out really small and then they spike and then they flatten out. And that's been every. You've been hearing all on the news about flattening the curve and social distancing and why we need to stay away from each other and all those things. It does appear to be flattening out. That is a good thing. That doesn't mean in some days and times we won't have spikes. Like around March 25, we saw a big jump. Some of that could be because of testing. This isn't great data, but it does appear to be flattening, which is a good thing. That is something to pay attention to and just want to share these numbers with you. Okay, check questions real quick. All right. State of the industry. Okay, let's start with this and I'll go into more detail later, but the state of the industry is confusing. In a word, it's confusing. I do not want to pretend like it. Everywhere is different given what's going on in your local municipalities. And it's different down to the county level. So but. And there's so much information coming at all of us. It's all so confusing. California, where I live, just on Sunday went from Deeming real estate. We were shelter in place as a state and real estate was deemed non essential. Then on Sunday they announced that it is now essential again. But some counties have the right to deem it non essential still if they want to. So. And we're getting massive amounts of updates from information as laws are passed. There's some stimulus stuff I'm going to talk about in a minute. There's just a lot of confusion anytime you're doing things as quickly as we're doing them as a country, most of which are to try to bolster the economy as this outside influence is putting just huge downward pressure on our economy. Most of what's being done is being done really fast. And when you do things really fast, you make mistakes and unintended consequences pop up. And so those are the kinds of things that we are starting to see. So I'll just kind of try to break this down. Eviction Lab so the big one on this, I really want you guys thinking about your mom and pop. Your mom and pop landlords, the people who bought their first house in town, then didn't sell it to buy their next one, and then didn't sell that one to buy their next one. And they're sort of accidental landlords where they've got three or four properties in town. It's really important that you communicate with these folks, your big corporate landlords, they're going to have issues too, but they have access to capital and bankers and different things that your clients, your mom and pop landlords don't always have access to. It's going to be really important that they have high communication with their tenants that if they want to get ahead of doing workouts with them, maybe a partial payment instead of a non payment. Every one of your clients that has residential real estate as a holding and has tenants will have some issues with this in some way. I just believe that really strongly. And so reaching out to them and just talking to them about it. Again, there's no ubiquitous, there's no complete plan across the nation when it comes to rentals. They're much more focused on, they're much more focused on mortgages across the nation. So this isn't getting the same level of attention, but it is important. I want you to go through your list of clients who own real estate that they hold as a rental and reach out to them. Just be a resource for them. That's that is our job as fiduciaries is to shepherd our people through this. So one thing that isn't getting talked about as much is these smaller mom and pop accidental landlords and how they're going to fit. They aren't designing stimulus for those folks. So at least being a voice for them and helping them weed their way through some of these things will help them out. So great touch point, great reason to call. Great, great way. You can provide really large value student loan. This is again, I would. If you want a market segment or just go through your sphere of influence, look for people that you know are doctors, lawyers, attorneys. Lawyers and attorneys are the same thing because I'm not doing 10 webinars a week right now. Reach out to the folks that have a lot historically have had a lot of student loan debt touch base with them. Make sure that they know and on any of these you've got to call, you can't just stop making the payments. Okay. So definitely reach out to the people in your life with a student loan. Homeowners may deliver mortgage payments, delay mortgage payments for up to a year. Most are not a year. And I'm actually going to go into this in more detail in the, in the issues that we're having around liquidity. It is a real issue. It is something that we should be aware of and be prepared for. So I'm going to go into that in more detail later. We on the Friday webinar that James and I did just a few days ago, we went deeper into this. If you really want to understand the inner workings, I would send you towards that webinar. If you need a link and can't find it, just shoot me an email keithnexthome.com I will make sure and track it down for you. But there is, there is furloughs There is the ability to not pay your mortgage for a period of time. But we don't want everyone to run out and not pay their mortgage. That would be very bad for the economy. And I'll explain why in a couple of slides. Oh, actually, I'll explain why right now. So there is a solution there for them. Here's what again, this is just happening because the speed the government thought, oh, I got a great idea. We'll tell people that most people spend a big chunk of their income on housing. So let's give some housing relief. It's not a bad idea and I believe it will have the desired effect for people who are losing their jobs and there are a lot of them, if they don't have to worry about their mortgage for a little while, that'll be a great solution for many folks. Not, not flawed logic. There's one problem. There was already a liquidity issue in the mortgage marketplace because rates were so low that the volume was just flooding in the volume of loans and banks were doing their best to keep up trying to turn their credit lines. And it was working okay. But we still had some liquidity issues. What the government didn't think through when they released this plan, and it's, it's not a judgment, right? It's just they're moving fast. When you move fast, you make mistakes. So but it is for most mortgages, your servicer, that's the person that you have automatic payments to that wherever that goes, the servicer takes in that money and then they actually send it to the note holder on the secondary mortgage market and they take a small premium for being the servicer of the loan, working with the public, many, many, many of those agreements, the servicer is actually required to pay the note holder even if the consumer doesn't pay. So and bankers know that a certain percentage of loans, that's all people are going to have issues from time to time. And it's not, they're built to withstand that. But no one's ever told someone they didn't have to pay their mortgage before. And now that is causing a massive liquidity issue in the financial markets. Meaning these banks may have to send millions and or billions in some cases. For the largest servicers, Wells Fargo and others, the large servicing portfolios now aren't sure how much are they going to have to send up to the note holder and then what does that leave them to make loans on? Here's the big thing on this one, if anybody needs it, it's there for them to take. And Perhaps people should consider it. If you can pay your mortgage, please do. Because if everybody in the United States decided not to pay their mortgage, we have a massive problem. Okay? But if you need it, it's there for you. And then also if you have buyers that are in contract or buyers who recently got pre approved and are going into the marketplace, please update their pre approvals, talk to their loan officer. The things that were true five days ago, three days ago, are not true today for a lot of these issues. And if you have deals that are getting weird or going sideways, you can email me, we can work with our lending partner. I cannot pretend like, look, if someone lost their job, that's there's not a magic secret bank that is giving unemployed people mortgages, okay? But if you need help on a deal that's going sideways, that's set to close, or then maybe we can help kick save some of these deals by having our mortgage partner take a look at it, they're open to doing that. We've got one single point of contact for you that can work through any issues in any state. And if there is a solution, they'll find a solution for you. So you can email me directly keithexthome.com on any of your loan situations that are going sideways. And then through our partner on next mortgage, we will help you find a solution. But absolutely, we'll try to find a solution. But absolutely update your pre approvals with your buyers that are coming into contract. If you're receiving offers on a listing and it's got a two week old pre approval letter, get a brand new one. You need real clarity right now with what's going on with this liquidity issue. I do think it will be solved. Please don't panic. I believe this will be solved. The government's already spent 2 trillion. What's 3 or 4, right? That's very tongue in cheek. But the moves that the government is making has been to stimulate the economy and help us make it through this. I doubt very highly that they are just going to let banks weather this storm all by themselves. I believe that they have already set up one facility that banks can go to to borrow money to make these payments to the, to the note holder. I believe they will create additional level of facilities with this as well. I'm also because this seems now that we've had some real estate agents with deals that are starting to fail to close, this seems to be a real issue. I am working on booking a national banker to do a Facebook live with me this afternoon at 4:30 Pacific. That's my goal. That is not confirmed, so I'm still working on that. But I hope to be able to do a Facebook live inside our group where I'll just be asking him questions like a real estate agent or like the consumer and he can give us the answer. So this is a real issue. It's something I want you all to be aware of. I think I've hounded this point enough. If you've got questions on this or anything else, let me know. All right, so stimulus bill, stimulus bills passed. What in the world does all that mean? Well, the answer is James and I just did a one hour webinar a few hours ago on exactly this. We're going to be pushing out that to the broker owners and the broker owners can share that information. If you really want that webinar, we can get it to you as well. The stimulus package, here's the Cliffs Notes on it. It's been released very fast. We are in day one of processing all this. So for example, there's a Small Business Administration has got some lending facilities now where they're providing some value. Their website was just updated today with the first form that was needed to begin to apply. So things are going really fast. Things are very complicated. Not everybody has all the answers yet. We have processed and read through the 880 page report and reached out to folks to provide us counsel. We've got some information on that. If you really, really want it, you can let us know or your broker will be getting it later on today as well. So that information is out there. And then just remember it is complicated right now down to the county level. So there is, these are the states with non essential business closures as of March 25, which feels like a lifetime even though it's only five days ago. These are the states that had it at that time. But a county could, could put in extra protections on top of what the state has done. So California for example was, I said this before, where real estate was considered non essential, it is now considered essential. And they provided some guidelines. Some counties in California have extra safety requirements on top of the state safety requirements for an essential business. So that's a long way of saying you just gotta be really purposeful about paying attention to what's going on not only at the federal level and the state level, but also at the county level. Especially if you're in one of those areas where you, you're, you cross county lines with some frequency. Please pay very close attention to what the, what the rules are etc. All right, that's my update on stuff that's happened in the last six days. If you.
