Offerin' Real Estate Insights

How to Navigate Market Volatility Without Losing Your Mind (or Clients)

• Offerin.io • Season 1 • Episode 2

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With market volatility affecting everything from buyer confidence to housing sales, today’s real estate agents are navigating a high-stakes landscape. 

In this episode of The Offerin Podcast, Darrin, Ben, and Kevin break down what it really takes to thrive when the market is anything but stable.

They explore how combining smart processes, dependable people, and powerful real estate agent tools can help you stay productive, even when housing market trends shift overnight. You’ll also hear how the right offer management platform can transform how you handle real estate transactions, especially when juggling multiple offers in real estate.

In this conversation, you’ll hear:

✔️  How real estate pros are handling today’s volatile market with confidence

✔️ The connection between consumer sentiment and real estate offers

✔️ Why process-driven agents protect their time and sanity

✔️ The role of digital real estate platforms in creating calm for clients

✔️ How Offerin gives agents an edge by organizing and streamlining the offer stage

This episode is a must-listen for agents who want to remain steady, clear-headed, and client-focused regardless of the market’s mood swings.


👉 Discover how Offerin helps agents win more deals, save time, and look like heroes to their clients. Visit Offerin.io to learn more or schedule a demo today.

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🔔 Subscribe to The Offerin Podcast—new episodes drop every other Wednesday—for practical insights on the tools, tech, and tactics transforming real estate. If today’s episode helped reduce stress or sparked an idea, please leave a quick review. It helps more agents discover smarter ways to manage offers, improve productivity, and stay present for life’s big moments.

Welcome to another amazing episode of The Offering podcast, where we talk real problems, real stories and real solutions in the world of real estate. Today, we're looking at market volatility and how to navigate it. The goal is to survive this chaos right. So in real estate in the world it seems like just chaos everywhere right. I think a tariffs you know we're in the world of tariffs right now. And how that freaks people out. And what's going to happen I think of, you know, egg prices and, you know, where used to be like that was one of the why is that such a big thing? Egg prices. The chickens stopped hatching. Yeah, I think that's the problem. The bird flew the bird like. Holy cow. I didn't realize eggs were going to just skyrocket in price, but anyway, we're here with Kevin and Ben, and we're diving into market volatility, specifically in real estate. So if we look at that, when you think of, what's the one word you think of when you say market volatility is one thought, in real estate right now, what's what's one volatile thing in real estate. Well, I think the. More. Volatile a thing right, in real estate is always volatility. So what do you mean systematic? Okay. The the world's always changing. Real estate is always going to change. Prices are going to change. People are going to move from here to there. There's always going to be some political thing. Interest rates are going to go up. Interest rates are going to go down. That's life. Yeah. So volatility is always going to happen. That is the one consistency in real estate is that it's going to be volatile. We're not going to get to just calm miss. So it hasn't been how many of the years you've been in this 20 plus year. Yeah. It hasn't just been chill. I don't think it's ever been chill has it? I think consumer sentiment is the driver of the volatile. Yeah. What do you mean by that? People when they're confident, you know, maybe the if they're the stock market, a lot of it I mean, I mean, a big portion is like the stock market is good. So a lot of people have their retirement account in the stock market. They get their sheet. It looks good. They feel confident, or, you know, prices are going up. You know, interest rates are down. Prices are going up. I should be getting into real estate. You know, like we like the last episode we talked about like there's like nine factors that help you make a decision. People will latch on to a few and then make their decisions. So right now tariffs now I think gas prices are lower right now. Right. So like there's actually a positive thing there. But but the the talk is there's a war. There's a tariff. There's the, you know, China whatever. Like so people are you know, Elon Musk is too involved, right. Get rid of your Tesla. So people are like, I don't know if I can make a decision right now. I'm not confident about the future. So then it starts to like but then they're overly confident at other times like, well, hey, this is going up. It's going to go up forever. Everybody knows it's not true, but they act like it is. So that, that it's like a lag time. That's what it's a lag time. So what's the what's the take on, the mortgage rates? Everybody says super high. I got locked in at 2.7 or whatever. 2.1. Yeah, yeah. I mean well they're higher than that. And one day maybe they'll be lower. Yeah. Maybe they won't all the other. Yeah. Yeah. But people aren't selling their homes. Not as many people are selling. Right. Typically six plus million homes are sold a year. Right now we're, we're low. Since 1985 we haven't been this low selling about 4 million houses a year. Interest rates have a big deal. Big part of that. Well I think I think I read something there was like 42 million people that have an interest rate of like 3% or something like that. So on the flip side of that equation though is like we have an all time low, I think of people in the trades and the cost of building materials and everything is, is up. So people are, you know, even that's volatile. It's like, well, I'm going to stay here. But I mean, if I want to put on a new thing, it's like super expensive to do that. So, you know, there's, and people keep getting divorced and dying and having babies. I mean, everything is happening, so there's like a logjam, but stuff still keeps going. So I think it's, even stock traders would say, you like, buy on your way up and you buy on your way down, like they're always interacting with whatever it is today. And it kind of goes up, down, up. I think the way you mitigate volatility out of that is actually knowing what you're buying. Like if you buy a let me give you a bad example, a Ford Focus. I remember they when they used to make those like they like like the engines would practically fall out of those things. Right? I don't know that. Well, there were terrible in rust out. I think they redid them. Now they call them something else. Sorry. Ford Fusion. I think the fusion is a little better, but the Ford Focus was like they would rust out and whatever. So if you're putting a big investment into a Ford Focus versus if you were putting that same money into, say, like a Toyota, you know, they had a rusty bed problem a while back. But like is just go forever. I mean, they legit do. So clearly to it. A guy my family was was a Ford Ford family. My grandma feel sorry. For me find a Chevy Cobalt or whatever it was a Chevy Cobalt, whatever. Like if you, you know, like if you know all the factors of what you're doing, you can still make a great investment into a piece of real estate regardless of where the market is at. But that's separate from that's like getting the it's education, it's knowledge. It's understanding of all the factors actually reduces the, the volatile ity in a volatile environment. So check this out. Like when you think of these the volatility and what's happening in the market. Back in the 1960s, 1964, they came up with this business management, model essentially is what they call it. But it's people process technology. They call it the Golden Triangle. So the Golden triangle, all three of these pieces lean on top of each other. So taken from that car example, you have, the engine, which is the technology that makes something run. You have all the wiring, the mechanics, those components. That's the process. And then you have somebody sitting in the car driving the car. That's the people. So when you're looking at it, people process technology in that order. So the idea of this business management principle is that that builds structure and builds, you know when you're looking at problems i.e market volatility, you have people, those people to be effective, you have to have process to support those people and then ultimately technology to support the process, then supporting the people. So I would say, you know, looking at that concept from market volatility as a real estate agent, people process technology. Right. So thinking about these things, Kevin, you have a successful brokerage. You know, how are people part of that? We actually just discussed offline, you know, some of that this morning, having the right people around. But yeah, share with me like some examples of how, in the chaos, people have been a big part of that. Well, give you a quote that we just got from somebody, we have what's called a digital agent package, which is a little bit different than a traditional real estate agent. A when we work with somebody who hires us for the digital agent package, we never go out to their house. We never meet these people in person. We they hire us. We sell their house for them all virtually. We never go there. And so in that, there's a lot of ambiguity in terms of, people, the seller of that property. Not really knowing who we are. Oftentimes they're a little bit afraid, like, what am I really getting here? Can I trust these people? And one of the reasons they do it is because they're saving some money. So that's a, that's a, that's a thing that they like. But we just talked to somebody the other day. His wife really wanted to hire us. She loved everything we did, love the branding, love what we put together. Sorry, our whole process, but he was a little bit on the fence about hiring us, and he he, I got on the phone call with me the other day, and he actually told me that. He said, you know, I was really kind of skeptical about hiring you guys. My wife wanted to. I was kind of like, I don't know about these guys. What's going to happen in this process? But he said he told me the other day, he said, But I'm a believer now. Everybody I've met from your company is a star. And they've made me believe in your product. So the people he's met has been our administrative person who handles getting all the paperwork signed, our photographer who does go out to the house, and the person who installs the sign, and you think, oh, that's just a menial jobs. Somebody that's going out there to install a sign? Yeah. And really, that person that was showing up with your brand, he's showing up with your colors. He's putting the sign in the right spot. He's introducing himself to the seller. So even that matters. Now, I will say one time we have put a sign out in the incorrect yard. That was not good. But we corrected that really quick. We knocked on the neighbor's door and apologized and said, Heard you're selling your house. That's exactly right. That was recent, by the way. But, but all that, all that goes, goes a long way. So the people you have interacting with your clients is very important. And the truth is, some of that you can train for, you know, you can train for skills, you can train how to do something. But if somebody wasn't, if somebody doesn't have the soft skills, that's a really big deal in real estate, because we're interacting with people. We're interacting with a lot of money. We're interacting with emotionally, emotional scenarios often. And so having the soft skills to deal with that's really important. Well, yeah, we'll get to that. The emotional piece here in just a minute. But, you know, moving into process, you know, you've, I've heard you say before, you know, it's hard to scale a real estate business without systems in place, but, you know, for, for an agent, what is the number one thing that can happen if they don't have processes in their in their business. They miss their kids little League baseball game. Yeah. And they're not present for it, which is probably one of the saddest things. They don't have boundaries. The process lets you have boundaries. Okay, great. What are some processes that think of. Oh, well, I mean, let's I mean. The obvious. One. I will make a quick easy plug for offer in here. You know, we I was at my kid's little league baseball game this week, and we sold five houses. Well, they're not completed yet, but the offers for those houses were coming in, and. Okay, the software allowed us to. I mean, our clients are. First thing this morning I texted one of them, I was like, hey, how were you so pumped last night? Because it came in late. All the offer we had listed 4 or 5 houses. We listed four houses on on Thursday and usually by Mondays, like when they're all going to kind of settle out because it kind of people are waiting for people to come over the weekend. And his had had no offers on it so late on Sunday met the championship game of the too much baseball tournament or whatever and think, you know, there it came through. I was like, oh man, it's so good. I'm so excited. I mean, I just I knew the guy was going to be like, excited about it. Now. It didn't have all exactly what he wanted, but he wasn't worried all weekend about whether we were doing our job or not. He was we weren't worried about what he was doing. Yeah. We knew that at the moment that it came that we would have a relevant conversation. So the, the, the process of having something in your life to put boundaries around like what's important to you. Yeah. Allows for you to then you know, the technology then ultimately it's the tech. Let the technology do the work right. And then we'll have, a five minute conversation today, a very valuable, relevant conversation today. Not, long winded. Whatever. Yeah. Kevin, you've been using our friend for a while. What are some of the things that it's done for your business, like from a systematized process perspective? Yeah, well, we sell a lot of houses. You know, we're going to sell 120 to 150 houses this year. And so being able to be organized with that, to have everything in the same location every time, to be able to see all of the data whenever I need to see it quickly and be able to have relevant conversations when I need to have them. With all of the information at my fingertips, it's the most important thing. You know, people say, what is that quote? They're in 95% and 5%. What's that quote? Yeah. Offers are 5% of what a real estate agent does. A 95% of the value they bring. Yeah. And so when we're interacting with offers, that is the one spot. Everything boils down to this moment. It's like the pinnacle area. You've done all this work. You've gotten the photography listed the house. You feel that all incoming questions and everything comes down to this offer being submitted and ultimately being accepted. And the conversations around that offer are what are going to impact your clients next 30, 45, 60 days. It's like a ripple ripple through everything. That's right. And so when it comes to what is offer and allowed me to do number one, kind of sarcastically speaking, it's allowed me to be at my kid's baseball games or my daughter's dance recitals because I don't have to worry about this thing. But what it's really done to allow me to do that and to allow our team members to do that, is it's kept all the information in a consistent spot where it's always available and where it's handling the education and the communication to the seller. Oh, we're talking about volatility here aren't we. Yeah, sure. Listen this is like this is the real deal. And you can't this isn't this is invisible. This is like the ether. Offer in eliminates the volatility for the seller. It wipes it out. Yeah. The seller has so much anxiety whether visible or not, whether they know it or not. About like, is my agent telling the truth and doing their job and doing their very best for me is am I going to get an offer? Is my house good? Is it does it need something like there's all of this like angst? I mean, moving is horrible. So you're getting your house ready. You're trying to tell your kids to keep it clean, your dogs. But, I mean, it's chaos, right? Because you're trying to, like, make your house look perfect for a snapshot and then go back to living your life, and everybody keeps doing it. Well, that knowing that the people like knowing that like when something comes across, you're going to receive it puts their mind at ease. It allows them to relax and focus on the thing they need to focus on, which is keeping that house clean and getting it right, and doing all the things that we asked them to do without worrying about when it's going to happen or if, like, somebody didn't call them or whatever. And so and then when they get the offers, it also it secondarily releases the chaos because it's on their time on

in their space at 10:

00 at night, at three in the afternoon when they have time. So it it's almost just like. That it's taking the, it's taking the pressure out of this thing so that we can have calm minds to actually make great decisions. What it does not do at all is eliminate the need for expertise. Real estate agents, these people do not understand all the details. I mean, some of them do, kind of, but not really. It really the expertise of the agent being able to then help them decipher so that the echo of that offer, like what he's saying, if you pick the wrong one, it will echo the wrong way. Because people that you know, it's like, not that 5% importance or whatever you were talking about, they're they care that the sellers care about getting the right offer, but what they really, really care about is like, did it close? And did they get to move forward with their life? And it's either those they're connected. Those two moments, the offer and the closing are the same thing. You just want to you're basically closing with the right person. And so to be able to really focus on that, this software like it allows you to do that. I think it'd be good for anybody who doesn't know what offer in does or what it is. Might be good to share a little bit about what it does. Sure. So it's it's real estate's premier offer delivery portal. So essentially in its best or easiest form it receives offers extremely well and communicates offers really well. Yeah, yeah. So buyers agents can go to the app. They can, you know, download their offers to that particular listings portal. The buyer's agent then is confirmed that their offer was submitted. A listing agent receives the offers in its key terms as opposed to, you know, a 28 page purchase agreement, that they might have to leaf through and can quickly and easily communicate that to the to the sellers. Keeps everything organized. You know, if there's an a multiple offer situation, you can communicate those offer details, you can create counter offers that it's through those and communicate, very, very well through there. So that technology. So we talked about people process technology. You don't lead with technology. If anybody would just implement offer end of their business, it doesn't mean it's going to work. You need the people to to lead that. You need processes and systems set up to to put some boundaries. I like that term. Put boundaries around what you're doing and then the technology supports those boundaries. Yeah. So yeah from that perspective offerings extremely powerful. I do want to dive into the, the emotional management thereof. You spoke to that a little bit, but yeah. Kevin. Well, I think, you know, this conversation is about market volatility. And really how do you thrive as a real estate agent or real estate brokerage in market volatility? And the funny and contradictory part of this is you don't care about it. The truth is, the people who survive and thrive and do very well in market volatility are the people who have built strong foundational businesses built on people, process and technology. And those people, those businesses are going to thrive in whatever market that they're living in. And so, you know, watercooler talk in the real estate industry is always about interest rates, about tariffs, about politics, about this thing, about that thing. The truth is, from our perspective, we don't really care. We're going to thrive. We're going to build a great business. And any real estate agent who's doing a great job and wants to do that, the truth is they don't really care about market volatility. They're going to thrive in whatever market they're in with people, processes and great technology. They recognize that their customer has a real life circumstance right now. And all of those things are ultimately going to affect it. But actually, that person's life and family is what matters. And helping them move from A to Z, whatever it is, good or bad, it doesn't matter. It's like that's the job. And so that happens no matter what. Well, to wrap things up you can't control the market. But you can control your systems. You control the people you associate yourself with. You control the technologies that you implement in that business. But our friend helps agents really stay steady, show up strong and make confident decisions throughout that, chaos. Awesome. Cool. Thanks, guys. Definitely.