Stay ready…so you never have to get ready

The Market Won't Wait, Will You Be Ready When It Moves?

I recently gave a short talk at our company's national convention and described 2025 as the year of "Stay Ready." This is a brief written version of that message for our real estate agents. It's an interesting challenge to think about it through the lens of, "You’ve got five minutes to give them a message that helps their career." (I took nine minutes, much to my VP of Marketing’s consternation… sorry, Petya. Lol.) Distilling a thought down to five(ish) minutes forces you to find "one simple thing." So here you go, I hope you dig it.

Why "Stay Ready" in 2025?

A couple of reasons:

Reason One: We’ve been through three years of hell. While Bloomberg yammers on every morning about a possible recession, real estate has been in one for nearly three years. As an industry, a lot of us are tired, beat up, and just kinda "over it", like my 13-year-old feels about her math teacher. But real estate is poised for a comeback, and if we’re in a worn-out, detached mindset, we might miss the window for production this year. This was my way of knocking the rust off our agents and reminding them who they are, what they do, and that they need to be ready to pounce when the time is right.

I used three charts to tell the story of the real estate market:

Chart 1: The Orange Circle

The orange circle is the important part here. This shows the 30-year fixed interest rate from mid-2024 through November 2024. You see a steady but slow march down in interest rates from 7.2% to just over 6% before they spike back up. But look closer, by August, we got under 6.5% and stayed there until mid-October. Two full months under 6.5%. September was a great month for our company, mortgage banks, and just about everyone in real estate. Buyers were back.

This taught us something: at around 6.5%, buyers return, but they need time. Real estate isn’t a microwave; it’s an oven. The market has to preheat. Buyers hear about rates going down, then start exploring (or re-exploring) homeownership. They talk to a lender, get pre approved (or reapproved), connect with an agent, look for a house, get an offer accepted, and close. That takes months. For a market shift to materialize, rates need to stay at that level long enough for buyers to act.

Chart 2: The Purple Circle

See the purple circle? This shows a short-duration rate drop. Yes, rates got close to that magic 6.5% mark, but there was zero lift in real estate transactions. Why? Because it was too brief, rates dropped, then shot right back up to 7%. Not enough time for buyers to process, prepare, and execute.

Chart 3: Where We Are Now

This chart shows where we are today (or two weeks ago, rates have flattened out since, hovering around 6.7-6.8%). Rates are moving down and flirting with that magic 6.5% mark. Will we get there this month? Next month? Six months from now? I don’t know. If I did, I’d sell this Substack to Wall Street for a million dollars a quarter. But I feel confident about this: at some point in 2025, we’ll have an "orange circle" moment. It might last three months, or it could stretch to 13 months, but it will happen. And that’s why we have to (drumroll)… stay ready.

Three Charts, Then a Mike Tyson Photo?

Yep. Best analogy I can come up with for 2025.

I’ve been involved in some kind of combat sport since I was 10. Boxing was one of my favorites. In tournaments, there might be 15 fights (or more) in an afternoon. You have a rough idea of when you’ll go, but not an exact time. So you have to show up, go through your routine, get ready, but then stay in this weird middle state. You don’t want to peak too early and waste energy pacing the floor. But you also can’t be too relaxed, because you don’t "play" boxing.

You have to stay in that in-between place: on the balls of your feet, leaning forward, ready to go, but not too hyped. It’s a strange mindset, like when you pull a rubber band all the way back but haven’t let it fly yet. That’s where you need to be. (An analogy wrapped in an analogy, probably not a great writing technique, but here we are. Lol.)

That state of preparedness is what I’m pushing our people toward. I hope we get under 6.5% soon and stay there all year. But just in case 2025 looks like last year, where we only had a few months to make an entire year’s worth of deals, we need to stay ready.

-k

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