1. Where is the opportunity? What can we get in front of? What am I watching out for and talking to my clients and colleagues about? Go back to March and the start of covid and housing prognosticators and the markets.
2. One of the things I focus on is the Jobs Act legislation for estate taxation ending in 2025 Make sure your estate planning for parents and grandparents is set up. Big changes in 2025 or sooner with a Senate, House, and Presidency. Currently, you can gift over 11M but that will revert to 5M in 2025 or sooner if legislating ends it sooner.
3. Make sure all your family, friends, and clients who refinanced in the last 15 years actually put their properties back into their family trusts. Many lenders and inexperienced mortgage consultants talked people into taking properties out of trusts and financing them and forgot to put them back in. This happens all the time. I had a client just last week who forgot to put 2 homes back into their trust. Needless to say, his wife was not happy she discovered this.
4. Successor Trustee sales and item # 3 above. These are complicated sales and the demographics show that there will be an avalanche of them coming. Know what to do and how to coordinate and add value to the players who are providing service. Emotions are high in these real estate deals and people need to know the rules. That’s why its important to understand what
5. Rates and Timing- Spring Season in Covid/ Relocation shopping is going to happen in February of this year. Not March or April. People are going to want to look early and try to have less competition for housing. Relocation companies should be sensitive to this. Area Orientations need to happen sooner in my opinion.
6. OCC Housing Report- Touch on this. 8 or so big banks said that 26% of all forbearance approvals went to foreclosure anyway. That trend in the 1st 6 months of 2021 will increase in my opinion.
7. Rising Rental Rates all over. Example…Santa Barbara, Oxnard, and LA rates with travel time.
8. Inventory is low,  and rates are in a goldilocks scenario all around so I don’t see supply increasing in 2021 in standard sales. Remember Rates and prices are typically inverted. Rates go down, prices go up and we have nowhere to go by up on rates in a pre-pandemic solution. 
9. PPP Concerns – Did you apply as an Independent Relocation Consultant? Pay attention to rules of Forgiveness of this Income and how you can or can’t expense it for 2020,2021
10. CA High Taxation, Prop 15 got voted down- a pathway to piercing prop 13 which will be a giant sucking sound of boomers and Gen X moving out of CA. We should do a show just on this to help the independent relocation consultant community get informed.
11. More homes sold in CA, NY Wash St. due to Exodus to TX,NV, ID, UT AZ, SC and FL. Companies leaving- Tesla, Oracle, and others. Just ask Elon. CA 5th biggest economy. But as soon as Prop 13 is pierced the velocity of departure will accelerate. Add the gig economy moving people out of high-cost cities, rising interest rates, and an ever-increasing foreclosure rate not necessarily on GSE mortgages but the non-GSE loans or portfolio loans on banks’ balance sheets. It could be a perfect mini storm.
12.   Payback of 27Trillion in Debt. How will we do it? Bonds are down, the stock market is at an all-time high, a global pandemic and there’s lots of talk in the bitcoin world of how fiat money is worthless- so it’s an assault on confidence in the dollar. There are some interesting thoughts about how gold and bitcoin play in the sandbox.
    
13. One thing for sure. The blockchain is here to stay and ill be teaching my kids to code soon.

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