Fannie Mae's latest forecast is a shocker: The Real Word

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Byron Lazine and Nicole White are two agents in Connecticut who give us their thoughts on the week’s news every Friday in “The Real Word,” a weekly video column on Inman.

Byron Lazine and Nicole White began this week’s episode with a discussion of Inman’s coverage of Fannie Mae’s downgrade for existing-home sales expectations in 2022 and 2023. Early in the year, its economic forecast division predicted a 1.2 percent decline, which it later changed to 11.1 percent.

Now, Fannie Mae is predicting a decline of 13.5 percent for 2022 and another 11.2 percent in 2023. Lazine said that if those numbers are accurate, it would signal the lowest existing home sales since 2015. This amounts to a “cold war” where both sellers and potential buyers freeze and decide not to make moves.

Next, Lazine and White discussed Darryl Davis’s summer kickoff article. While they saw value in many of the items on the list, they felt that some of them were more appropriate for winter activities rather than summer. Grow your pipeline with calls and texts, Lazine said, rather than taking time off or initiating a geographic farm strategy.

Marketeer of the Week

This week’s Marketeer is Jimmy Burgess for this video on what must decrease for a business to increase. They offered a thank you for the advice to “decrease egos” coming out of the past couple of years. Too many newer agents who have never experienced a down market believe that they know the secret to the real estate industry. They need to check their egos and wait until they’ve been in the industry longer instead of just riding the recent “up wave,” said White.