Recently a colleague sent me a photo of a mortgage interest rate book from the 1970s. This was a time when people didn’t carry calculators - there were no smartphones or laptops - so a paperback booklet with preprinted tables of down-payments, interest rates and fee calculations were listed in pages of a “directory” you could reference when talking to home buyers. In the photo, the date was 1978 and interest rates started at 7% and went all the way to 18%.
Those were the prices of mortgages he was expected to sell, and consumers expected to buy, in the past.
And he sold millions worth!
Meanwhile, back in the present, too many real estate professionals and consumers are saying the market is “dead” because rates aren’t what they “used to be” at 3% two years ago.
They’re at 6.5% as of January 2023.
Which wouldn’t have made it into my friend’s book.
It made me think of those times when memories mess with our actions in the present. Rather than work with what we have, and find the solutions and paths forward with what we can do, we say to ourselves, “Things aren’t what they used to be,” and then we -
Freeze up and fail.
Because You’re always right - things aren’t ever what they used to be. In 1978, millions of salespeople had to sell their goods using a rotary telephone, knocked on doors and filled out forms with carbon-copy paper. They signed documents with a (gasp!) pen and made presentations with a three-ring binder. Social media meant going to events, shaking hands and making small talk twice a week. And videos were impossible because people didn’t wear televisions on their wrists.
Yet they sold billions of dollars worth of products and services every day.
Now this isn’t to say “the old days were worse” or to say “today we have it better.” It’s to say that at any time, in every market, you can only decide whether you’ll sell something today or not. Comparing the present to how you “could have done it” if things were higher or lower, faster or slower, doesn’t help. In fact it definitely hurts. Because you’re different than in the past, too. You have more training, systems, tools and opportunities.
And if you’re sitting around imagining how things might, could or should be -
Someone else who is better is making your sale instead.
Don’t psych yourselves out. Or confuse clients about what they can do today. Don’t talk too much about markets one, three or five years ago, when you need to deal with markets today and a few days ago.
If you’re going to remember something about the past to help you today -
Recall that millions of successful people just like you dealt with their time being different than their past, and they didn’t let it stop them -
Or even slow them down. Of that, I’m not just 6% or 18%but 110% sure!!