On the heels of a roller-coaster stock market and emergency rate cut from the U.S. Federal Reserve as fears about the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19) impact the U.S., mortgage rates hit a historic low this week. The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage plummeted to 3.29 percent, an all-time low, according to Freddie Mac.

“The average 30-year fixed-rate mortgage hit a record 3.29 percent this week, the lowest level in its nearly 50-year history,” Freddie Mac Chief Economist Sam Khater said in a statement. “Meanwhile, mortgage applications increased 10 percent last week from one year ago and show no signs of slowing down.”

According to the 2020 NAR Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends report, 75 percent of buyers and 73 percent of sellers said they would definitely use their real estate agent again or recommend to others. This is why it’s the responsibility of agents to stay memorable to their clients, and why they should make that a priority.

Holidays are an excellent way to keep in touch with your past clients and remind them that you’re still around. Sending out a cute, handmade holiday card, or even a box of chocolates, helps remind the client that you’re looking out for them, and that you’re keeping them in mind. Once the time rolls around for them to move out, they will feel familiar and more willing to work with you.

We are so blessed to be living in an age where we can brand ourselves and curate a target audience that can keep up with what we’re doing every day. You should use this to your advantage in your business. Social media can become a way for your clients to see how your business is unraveling. Plus, they can keep in contact with you right from their pockets.

Keeping track of all your clients can become tedious. It requires a lot of effort and dedication to keep all of your data in order. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a true blessing for real estate agents. Not only does this automated marketing tool help you stay organized, it also reminds you when to interact and stay up to date with your clients.

If you interact and close with clients in a transaction style and restart from scratch after every year, you will just end up losing morale and motivation in your career. A huge part of being a real estate agent is building interpersonal relationships; this is how you get your strongest form of clients (return and referral). If you treat being a real estate agent like a job, it will feel like — a job. If you treat it like a career, you will be able to grow and become very successful.

“Shark Tank' star and founder of The Corcoran Group, Barbara Corcoran lost money after approving a fraudulent money transfer. She's just the latest victim in a growing trend..

Corcoran’s experience highlights the growing and high-stakes threats posed by scams, which typically involve an email that looks legitimate but in fact dupes the victim into wiring money to a thief. The incident also reveals how no one, even famous people, are immune.

In Corcoran’s case, she is likely to emerge from the scam fairly unscathed. After founding the Corcoran Group in 1973 with just $1,000, she went on to sell it to Realogy in 2001 for, according to The Wall Street Journal, $66 million.

Corcoran subsequently went on to appear as an investor in nine seasons of the TV show Shark Tank, and today her net worth is estimated to be $80 million.

But not everyone who falls victim to similar scams is so fortunate.

In one recent high-profile incident, a California couple lost more than $700,000 after following wiring instructions in a fraudulent email that appeared to come from their real estate agent.

Another incident in 2018 resulted in an Oregon man losing $122,850 — money he and his family had saved for a down payment — to a similar scam

Analysts have said that real estate makes an especially tempting target for scammers because it involves high-dollar transactions that often have online components. And last year, the Federal Consumer Protection Bureau (FCPB) warned that phishing scams rose a staggering 1,100 percent between 2015 and 2017.

Broker AJ Powers put on face paint and a clown suit to show why so many agents fail not long after joining the industry.

Powers released a 10-minute video in which he dresses up as a clown before transitioning into a successful real estate agent in a marketing video. He owns real estate firm Powers Premiere and leads a series of agent mentorship programs, for which this video is a recruitment tool.

The idea, California-based Powers told Inman, was to show a number of mistakes new agents make when first joining the industry — not dedicating themselves to the job, squeezing in open houses between other projects and expecting to start bringing in money without doing any training or learning anything about the industry.

The point he wanted to make is that you have to be serious and stop clowning around with your real estate career..

Real estate giant Zillow has beaten back an antitrust lawsuit regarding its Zestimates, but continues to fight another lawsuit stemming from its agent-lender co-marketing program.

The first was brought in 2018 by New Jersey-based company EJ MGT which owns 142 Hoover Drive, an 18,000 square-foot, seven-bedroom, 10-bathroom home in Cresskill, New Jersey. The company blamed the home’s failure to sell on buyers being turned off by the Zestimate on the property’s detail page on Zillow.com, which put the property’s value at less than half of the listing price: $3.7 million (Zestimate) vs. $7.8 million (list price).

In a separate case, the court rejected Zillow’s bid to toss a lawsuit from a group of shareholders that alleged Zillow senior staff and its board of directors failed to protect the company properly while allowing it to violate a federal anti-kickback law through its agent-lender co-marketing program and made misleading statements about the program’s compliance.

The case is related to class-action securities fraud suits brought by shareholders against Zillow in August and September 2017 after the company divulged the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been investigating its co-marketing program for the previous two years for compliance with the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA).

Spencer Rascoff, a co-founder and the former CEO of Zillow Group listed his Brentwood Park, Los Angeles home for $24 million on Thursday, which is nearly $8 million more than the Zestimate, Zillow’s often-maligned automated valuation model says the home is worth