The Double Comma Club

The Double Comma Club


Coffee Talk - Recapping the Week in Real Estate 03212020

March 28, 2020

 Welcome to our first Agent Ignite Coffee Talk. I've got my water. As I was telling Jeremy Keen earlier, he's like, "Where's your coffee?" I'm two coffees in already, so I'm already a little shaky and I talk fast anyway, so I'm not sure you guys could keep up if I had a third. That's the New Yorker coming out in me. Our first weekly Agent Ignite Coffee Talk, we're going to do this until we don't. We're going to do this until things settle down again.Right now, things are happening at light speed. It is just changing daily, and so the moment we don't need this anymore, we'll pull back to our monthly, but for right now, we do. The only Fridays that it won't happen on is the Friday that we have the third Thursday monthly agent night. We're going to hold true to that format. I've got Bruce Gardner coming in April. Hopefully, we'll all be back together again in May, but we've got an incredible speaker lineup for our monthly events.We're going to keep doing those, so let's jump in. I want to share what happened this week, but I want to put it in the perspective of where we came from. Listen to the Q&S Session from this week's coffee talk here >RSVP: Coffee Talk:   https://fairwaymc.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_5xzg3jN3SDiM8mHV4FNQ0wAgent Ignite:  https://theruethteam.com/Agent-IgniteHow fast can you listen or read? Nicole had a bunch of coffee for this so we know she's speaking fast, but if you missed something, you can replay or read through the transcript here:We're going to keep doing those, so let's jump in. I want to share what happened this week, but I want to put it in the perspective of where we came from. Everybody's trying to liken this recession to 2008, or even to 9/11, and I get it. We want to compare it to something, because with that comparison comes a sense of familiarity, something that I can wrap my head around, but it's not necessarily comparable.For that, I want to be very specific that this is different. This, as you guys probably already know, is a pandemic. It is all centered around the Coronavirus. The faster we move towards a treatment plan, the faster we pull out of this. The housing market was the strongest it had ever been. In fact, home sales were at a 13-year high, housing starts were at a 13-year high, we had tight inventory, which we'd love to see more supply.That tight inventory was giving us appreciation. We had strong demand and we're going to continue to have strong demand. You guys saw, if you were last week's Agent Ignite, where I showed you the average age of a home buyer is 33, and for the next five years we have this massive population gain, so thankful for those babies being born 33 years ago, we have this continued demand and life will go on.Kids will graduate, people will have to move, people will have babies, and that's just going to happen and it's going to continue to happen. We have this continued demand and we also have low-interest rates, and we're going to talk about interest rates a little bit, but they have been extremely volatile, but they're still low. On any given day, I'm walking anything between three and a quarter and four and a quarter, and I know that sounds high, today's market, four and a quarter.That swing historically is still at amazingly low-interest rates, and we all know that once we get into a recession, that those rates are going to continue to stay low. We've got a while of low-interest rates on our side, which is going to help affordability. Affordability is fantastic, of course, for those people that haven't lost their jobs, and my heart does go out to them. I'm not removing the fact that this whole thing has a huge health side to it.I'm trying to stay focused on the economic side so that I can provide you guys the stability so that you can continue to educate your clients, I can continue to educate you, but yes, personally, we're all dealing with this, and that I don't take lightly. We also have highly qualified buyers. We had highly qualified buyers c