Millennials Misunderstood

Three Things Real Estate Agents Can Do To Compete With iBuyers


iBuyers are the latest threat to agents, offering lower listing fees, faster transactions and an online-based process that’s basically made for millennials (an important fact, considering millennials now make up a  whopping 36%  of all home sales.)

In most cases, agents can’t compete on those things — and they never will. But that doesn’t mean they’ve become moot or are on the edge of extinction, as many would have you believe. Like the story of David and Goliath, the big guy doesn’t always win. In fact, he might not have as much of a competitive edge as most would think.

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Single Women Outpace Single Men as Homeowners
Single women own 22 percent of U.S. homes, compared to the 13 percent share owned by single men,  according to new data from LendingTree .
 
Among the nation’s major cities, New Orleans has the highest ratio of single women homeowners compared to their male counterparts, with a 27 percent to 15 percent difference. Miami has the largest gap between the genders on single-person homeownership: Households owned and occupied by single women took up a 26.81 share versus the 14.22 percent share of households owned and occupied by single men.
 
“In much of the United States, single women are outpacing single men when it comes to homeownership,” said LendingTree Chief Economist Tendayi Kapfidze. “This trend may be somewhat surprising, given the average woman in the U.S. only makes 80 percent of what the average man does. Nonetheless, the data clearly indicates that single women are more likely to own a home than single men are. For example, in the New York metropolitan area, single women own slightly more than 820,000 homes. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, that number is around 460,000. On the flip side, single men own about 435,000 homes in the New York area and about 260,000 homes in the Los Angeles area. In both cases, single women owned nearly twice as many homes as single men did.”

Article: NMP
Millennials Looking for a Place to call Home

Make way for millennials! According to the Dave Ramsey website, in 2019 millennials will lead the way in number of mortgages, accounting for 45% of the market. As the millennial generation reaches adulthood, they are moving into the housing market looking for a place to call home. However, it is not in the (credit nor debit) cards for most to be living in the city like modern TV drama would have you think.


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3 Home Repairs That Can Save a Sale

Sellers whose homes aren’t in tip-top shape may need to spend extra money or put in a little elbow grease to get their properties in market-ready condition. But what are the most important repair or maintenance tasks that support a higher asking price? “Smaller and less expensive updates in combination with good staging will have a great return,” Susanna Haynie, GRI, a sales associate with Colorado Real Estate Group in Colorado Springs, told HouseLogic. 

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December was an exceptionally busy month for our staff with our annual Professional Development Day, Toys for Tots Drive, and holiday shenanigans.

The theme for our retreat was “The Not So Quiet Place.” This came about due to one of our Staff Appreciation days we had over the summer where we all got to watch a movie called The Quiet Place where the characters were not able to make noise or talk without being devoured by an alien monster. Obviously this makes communication very hard.

Well we thought the opposite would work well for a theme for our Professional Development Day and we would incorporate communicating and working together as teams to complete tasks/games. Needless to say, we think the retreat went over really well with the staff as you can tell by the images.

Nothing like a friendly game of Nerf War to bring together team building skills. In case you are unaware that our staff can be quite competitive and took this very seriously in trying to knock little rubber duckies off of cups and targeted soda cans off of a ladder. In between each of these shooting ranges, the staff had to perform some sort of obstacle such as spinning in an office chair five times or completing a game of ping pong.

Lastly, the staff divided into two teams and played a game of Family Feud. They even had real buzzers, which is what is shown in the pics below with our two team members facing off and trying to keep it together.