How to Thrive in a Real Estate Market Shift with Jim Remley

Justin Stoddart  
Welcome back to the Think Bigger Real Estate Show. I'm your host Justin Stoddart, and I'm very excited to have a guest back with us today who's done some amazing things. Before I introduce him, I want to remind you the purpose of this show is to knock over the lead domino, which is to increase your thinking. As you start to think bigger.. the last domino is that you have a life of amazing impact and it all starts through thinking bigger and so I've got the great privilege of hanging around people like today's guest to help you think bigger. As I put you around big thinkers and build this tribe of fellow big thinkers, your life will be impacted. That's my goal. I'm excited to have Jim Remley back he is out of Southern Oregon. He's a 30 year veteran of the industry, actually started his first year in real estate at 19. At 23, he was already opening up his first office, built that to 17 offices, and now runs a top of 500 Real Trends business. He and his agents will sell almost a billion dollars this year in sales. They've done that for the past number of years. I'm thrilled to have Jim Remley back on the show. Jim, thanks for joining us again and pouring back into the Think Bigger Real Estate audience. 

Jim Remley  
Always excited, Justin, you're an amazing guy. And I love the I love listening to the podcast and the live broadcast myself. So it's a pleasure to be here. 

Justin Stoddart  
Thank you, Jim. that's a that's a great honor having someone like you say that. For those that aren't aware, I'm going to I'm going to kind of bring this up now. Jim, in every regard, in every right is a coach, again, he's done it himself and he helps countless agents do it. And so before I make you all wait to the end, I want to point people right now to his website, which is erealestatecoach.com, and I'm on there for $97 a month you get online, you get live training, tons of videos, and he gives all the listeners of the Think Bigger Real Estate Show a 14 day free trial. So if you don't quite make it to the end of this episode, please go take a visit. If you're interested in upping your game in 2020 now's the time and Jim's a great guy to learn from so thanks for that generous offer. By the way, Jim, I really appreciate you offering that. 

Jim Remley  
You bet. 

Justin Stoddart  
So today's show is going to go into the, obviously, we are experiencing a bit of a market shift and how do we shift with it? How do we prepare ourselves to move more into a buyers market? Jim, explain to us a little bit what you see economically. And we talked a little bit before, would you kind of share with the audience what you're seeing, you've been at this for 30 years, right? This is this is not new to you to realize that markets inhale and exhale,describe to us kind of what you're seeing right now and maybe what we can be prepared for.

Jim Remley  
So we're I was telling agents, I was at a convention up in Bellevue, Washington last week, we had this conversation. You know, we're, we're 10 years into a seven year cycle. And so we've had this great run and spent a tremendous upswing in the market for a long, long time. But we have to expect that the market is going to shift at some point and you can't expect just that to continue on and on and on and on. But the shift won't be as dramatic as a great recession, we can predict that it's not that situation. People forget in the Great Recession when we entered that we had 11 months of inventory going into that. Right now we have four months of inventory nationwide. So it's a completely different market environment. We had much higher interest rates than we do now. So what what will drive the shift is inventory really. And as inventory increases, that's when you go for it's all supply versus demand, right. But last year, I just was we were having this conversation just about what changed, you know, kind of the feeling every kind of kind of feel it in the market. There's kind of a feeling in the market right now about a little bit of a shift. But last year, at this time, in November, December, we were sitting at a much, much higher interest rate back interest rates that it hit a peak in December. And in most markets, it was like a wet blanket hit the market. In my market. We ourselves were off 50% last December. And the same time we would still had double digit appreciation on many markets. And so by our resistance to prices, combined with higher interest rates caused everybody to kind of step back and say, wait a second, I'm not gonna lie for a minute. And the Fed at that point in December last year said, we're going to raise interest rates three more times in 2019. So I was preparing my agents were a major market shift. What happened is the Fed reverse course completely and actually decrease rates three times, maybe even four times. Coming in, we got another one coming, actually, they just announced. So what happened is we had this increase of inventory steadily all the way through July. And price appreciation went from double digits to single digits. And in some markets across the country. We actually had price reductions. And then in August, and now in September, we've seen the market kind of will come back. And the reason is, interest rates hit a seven year low in August. And so my in my market in September, we had a 40% year over year, increasing sales 40% more than we did in 2018. So people would say, oh, we're past it. We're not going to have any kind of correction. But that kind of thinking is what everyone wants to think, cycles. And you can't think that way, you got to just assume that at some point, there is going to be a correction. And if I prepare for it now, I'm gonna be way ahead of my competition. So that's, you know, that's a message, I'm telling all my agents, let's start thinking about how we're going to position ourselves coming into a buyers market. And, Justin, as you and I talked about before the session, it's really a tale of two markets. Right. And I don't know about it, where you're living and working. But for most of the country, the the luxury market is a completely different market than the starter or move up market. And so is that true for you?

Justin Stoddart  
Yeah, we're absolutely seeing that we're seeing, you know, price reductions, we're seeing increases of inventory, you know, in all the luxury markets. So yeah, it's absolutely and that's it tends to be as you have identified tends to be kind of the, you know, the lead indicator that we're coming into some softening of the market is when the high end starts to be affected.

Jim Remley  
Absolutely. And I just study last week. quarters has been an increase in the number of luxury listings across the country last quarter, it was up 19% but that's a nationwide but in the West, when you break it down by the West, there's a lot higher numbers on that. I was looking at the numbers recently for my market, we're up 114% on the number of listings that are active in our market compared to a year ago in the luxury category, then is up 19 92% I think though he was up 35%. So you look at these numbers in your market and you can see it's really a tale of two markets below in in my market, it's below 750 your market might be a little below million dollars, but at some status or substrata I should say the market is different, right? And that will start to flow downward and you'll start to see that creep into other lower price tiers. So we talked about how do you deal with this stuff right? What do I do if I'm listing a luxury house or in my market it's already Creek down and I'm starting to see it. You know a lot of agents are prepared for this because if they got in the market, and 2010 or 2011, or 2012, they've been living through this huge expansion of the market. They've never lived through a buyers market. And...