Keeping it Real Podcast

Number one in her local MLS every year since 2020. Eleven hundred transactions. Three hundred fifty million dollars in career sales. And Natalie Taflinger Realtor has done it without a single cold call.

On this week's Keeping It Real, she and I covered how to prep a listing before it goes live without losing the seller to an agent who'll just take it as-is, how to have the pricing conversation with data instead of emotion, and how community involvement, the kind that actually fits your life, builds a referral business that never needs a cold call.

Here's the move: before your next listing appointment, build your vendor list. A painter, a cleaner, a stager. Names and numbers you trust. When a seller says the house is ready and it isn't, you don't argue. You hand them a plan. That's how Natalie turns the hard conversation into the reason they send her referrals.

Full episode linked below. Then spend twenty minutes putting that vendor list together.

Episode - https://loom.ly/3EpsHVs

More than half of every mortgage in America is under 4 percent. To move, the typical owner would give up nearly fifty thousand dollars. So they don't.

That comes from the FHFA. One in five mortgaged owners is under 3 percent. Trading that rate for today's six and a half costs about four hundred dollars more a month, and the FHFA puts the real cost near fifty thousand dollars a household.

We call this a slow market. It was never slow. It's handcuffed. Lock-in stopped 1.72 million homes from ever hitting the market between 2022 and 2024.

Three moves this week.

One. Pull your farm and flag everyone who bought or refinanced in 2020 or 2021.

Two. Drop the phrase slow market. Say handcuffed market and explain why.

Three. Run the real cost-to-move for one past client and send it to them.

The market was never slow. It's handcuffed. And handcuffs come off.

Chicago home prices are up 5.4 percent over last year. The whole country is up 1.9. Almost three times faster than the rest of the map.

The boring flyover city, quietly out-earning most of the country.

Right now the seller holds the cards. Three months of supply, prices near record highs. Price a home right and it’s gone fast. Price it wrong and it sits for seven weeks.

Every homeowner you know is sitting on more equity than they realize, and most have no clue this is the market to sell into. That’s not a market update. That’s a listing appointment.

Go ask the question. Not “wanna buy?” to strangers. “Do you know what your place is worth right now?” to everybody.

We’re not the boring market. We’re the quiet one.