The upcoming year could be challenging if you’re a real estate professional. According to the National Association of Realtors, more than half of the currently active real estate agents haven’t ever worked in a market where prices were decreasing.

According to NAR, the median years of experience in the industry is eight years, and we’ve had almost 12 years of an up market.

So how do you deal with things like an inventory of listings as a real estate agent, especially if you don’t have experience in challenging markets? When do you ask for a price reduction? What else should you know?

It can be a chance to thrive if you take advantage of what’s available. With that in mind, the following are key things for real estate professionals to know as we head into 2023.

First-time buyers went down from 34% in 2021 to 26% this year.

The demographics of first-time buyers are changing, and real estate agents need to understand these shifts. The typical first-time buyer for 2022 was 36 years old, compared to 33 years old last year.

Of the buyers, 18% included unmarried couples, and 5% were different types of households—these were record highs for both of these groups.

Despite declines in first-time buyers, it’s a group that realtors need to be prepared to market to, and they need to understand their needs no matter their age and how that might look different from previous years.

One option available to real estate agents to tap into what would-be buyers want and need is to host homebuying seminars on a very local level.

When building relationships with your clients, you have to become adept at managing expectations, whether for buyers or sellers. You can’t control their decisions entirely, but one of the worst things that can happen, especially in a challenging market, is that your clients experience dissatisfaction or disappointment and you possibly lose business if you don’t manage expectations early on.

You need to let your buyers and sellers understand what they need to get done on their part.

This might be more challenging when dealing with sellers because they could still have that 2021 or early 2022 mentality. They’re still feeling the entitlement of a seller’s market and maybe not realizing that things are changing.

You must be honest with your clients and not sugarcoat anything in the conversation. Instead, focus on maximizing things for them in the best way possible. It’s tough to talk about market changes, but take the emotionality out of these conversations to best serve your clients no matter the conditions.

You want to understand very closely what’s happening in your local market. Maybe you have seen a lot of expired listings lately, and you could see the initial clues that a buyer’s market is shifting to something more complex for you locally.

You always have to be on top of each data point to create a niche for yourself and be very in tune with not just what’s happening nationally but hyper-locally.

Finally, with high interest rates and people struggling to save down payments, you can help your clients in 2023 by learning more about available programs.

There are many options, like grant programs for down payments, federal programs for first-time homebuyers, and more. You want to be able to be a source of information for them even if things are more challenging than they were in the past few years.

You want to be intentional with everything you’re doing, from your marketing to the conversations you’re having with clients in 2023, and you can create pathways for success even among shifts in the market.

Source: What Realtors Should Keep in Mind for 2023 Realty Times (December 21, 2022) Ashley Sutphin