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Today's track: Stir It Up — Bob Marley

There are more real estate meetups in Louisville right now than at any point since I got into this business in 2013. Investor groups. Landlord groups. Mentoring nights. Coaching circles. Lender lunches. Wholesaler breakfasts. Everything has niched down into its own little room.

And a lot of those rooms are half empty.

Same speaker rotation. Same slides. Twelve people in the front two rows and forty empty chairs behind them. Then everybody walks out to the parking lot and says the same thing: it's the economy.

Some of it is. Inventory's sitting over 4,000. Rates are stuck in the sixes. Deals are harder, money's tighter, and when money's tight people protect their evenings. I get it.

But I don't think that's the whole story. I think a lot of these groups stopped changing, and the world didn't wait for them.

Here's what changed.

Ten years ago, if you wanted to understand how a seller-financed note works, you had to find the one person in town who'd done twenty of them and buy them lunch. Today you can ask Claude at two in the morning and get a plain-English answer, a sample payment schedule, and the three questions to bring to your attorney. Data's the same way. I can pull every price cut in Jefferson County before my coffee's done.

Knowledge is free now. Data is free now. So the person at the front of the room reading information off a slide is competing with your phone — and your phone doesn't make you drive across town at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday.

The world isn't run by the people who know things anymore. It's run by the people who know how to use what they know, and then actually act on it. That's a different product. Most meetups are still selling the old one.

Your meetup is a podcast with worse chairs.

Some numbers, because I can't help myself.

Harvard's Robert Putnam spent years on this for his book Bowling Alone. Between the 1970s and the late '90s, Americans' attendance at club meetings dropped 58%. His most famous finding: more people were bowling than ever, but league bowling fell 40%. People didn't quit bowling. They quit bowling together.

It got worse. The U.S. Surgeon General's 2023 report found Americans went from about 60 minutes a day in person with friends in 2003 to about 20 minutes in 2020. For people 15 to 24, it fell about 70%. The same report says being socially disconnected carries a health risk similar to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

In 1990, 3% of Americans said they had no close friends. By 2021 it was 12%. Four times as many. Pollsters started calling it a friendship recession.

And our own industry is shrinking under our feet. The National Association of REALTORS (NAR — the national trade group most agents pay dues to) hit a record 1.6 million members in October 2022. As of this June, it was about 1.44 million. Fewer agents, fewer deals, smaller rooms.

Now the one that should sting if you run a group. An event-software company called PheedLoop looked at check-in data from more than 1,000 events. Free events lose a median 28% of the people who RSVP'd. Small free events — 10 to 49 people, which is basically every meetup in this town — lose about 37%. More than a third of the people who said yes just don't come.

Jason Fried, who runs the software company Basecamp, tested a fix this year. His last free breakfast had 84 sign-ups and 38 people actually showed. So for the next one, he charged $100 at sign-up and handed every person a $100 bill at the door. Sign-ups dropped to 55. Fifty showed up. Fewer registrations, more people in the room.

But the part of that story I can't shake came from an event psychologist they interviewed. Her point, roughly: a high no-show rate might just be telling you the event wasn't that relevant in the first place.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Empty chairs are feedback.

Malcolm Gladwell opens his book Outliers with a little town in Pennsylvania called Roseto. In the 1950s a local doctor noticed almost nobody there under 55 was dying of heart disease, back when heart attacks were the leading killer of men in America. Researchers checked the diet. It was terrible. They checked genes, the water, the hills. Nothing explained it.

What explained it was Roseto itself. Neighbors stopping to talk on the street. Families cooking for each other in the backyard. And 22 separate civic organizations in a town of just under 2,000 people.

Twenty-two clubs. Two thousand people. Almost no heart disease.

The groups weren't the problem. The groups were the medicine. They just had to be worth showing up to.

So what's worth showing up to now? If knowledge is everywhere, a group has to give you something you can't get alone. Here's my list.

Applied knowledge, not information. Don't tell me what a novation is. Bring a real deal, put the numbers on the wall, and let the room take it apart.

Mentorship with skin in the game. Pair the person working their first deal with somebody who's done fifty, and have them report back next month in front of everybody.

Real deal flow. If I leave with a property, a buyer, a lender, or a contractor I didn't have when I walked in, I'll come back every month for the rest of my life.

Benefits. This is the one nobody in real estate talks about. AARP — yes, that AARP — started because a retired California teacher named Ethel Percy Andrus couldn't get health insurance for retired teachers. Dozens of insurance companies turned her down before one said yes. When she opened it up to everybody in 1958, membership was $2 a year, and about 130,000 people joined the first year. They came for the insurance and stayed for the community. The Freelancers Union pulled the same move decades later and passed 200,000 members on the back of group health insurance for people with no employer.

Now think about who's in a real estate meetup. Agents, investors, wholesalers, contractors, self-employed lenders. Almost none of us have a boss handing us a benefits package. In NAR's 2013 member survey, only 4% of Realtors got health insurance through their brokerage, and more than a third had none at all. A group that negotiates real group perks — health, dental, discounts on software, title, inspections — gives people a reason to show up that has nothing to do with a slide deck.

Systems. Help me build the thing. Bring-your-laptop nights where we set up the AI follow-up, the CRM (customer relationship manager, the software that tracks your contacts), and the lead routing — and everybody leaves with it actually working. I floated exactly that kind of night after the Party in the Woods, and I haven't stopped thinking about it.

That's the shift. From "come learn something" to "come leave with something."

And this isn't only about meetups. It's every business in this economy, mine included.

Lead with value. I say it so much my team probably rolls their eyes. But here's the part people skip: when your value stops being valuable, you don't get to keep leading with it. You have to find a new way to be useful. That's not failure. That's the job.

There's a line usually credited to George Bernard Shaw that I always half-remember, and I finally looked it up: those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Realtors, investors, lenders, title, all of us — the people who win the next couple of years will be the ones who adjust. New skills. New tools. A narrower lane where they're the obvious expert. I wrote about that in Be the Expert in Your Field and again in If the Leaves Can Change. Pick the corner of the market you want to own and go deep enough that people bring you their problems.

Because information you don't use doesn't stick around. A German psychologist named Hermann Ebbinghaus measured it in the 1880s, and researchers repeated his experiment in 2015 and got almost the same curve: without review, most of what you learn is gone within a day. You don't keep what you hear. You keep what you do.

Now the other half, and I believe it just as much.

The world needs more people in rooms together, not fewer. The loneliness numbers say so. Roseto says so. And the younger crowd is already voting with their feet. Strava's 2024 report found running clubs grew 59% in a single year, and more than half of Gen Z said making social connections was the main reason they joined. They're not skipping community. They're skipping boring.

Somebody's got to stir it up.

So here's the tease.

In December, at our Christmas party, we're announcing a new monthly meetup. I'll be hosting it with Alex Conway from Next Title, at his office.

I'm not giving you the name or the format yet, because I want to see your faces when we announce it. I can't wait to tell you all about it. But I'll tell you what it's built on.

Lead with value. Get the right people in the room. Make it smart, make it clever, and make it fun.

It's going to skew younger — a youthful alliance, if you will — but youthful is a mindset. If you're 70 and building AI workflows, you're our people.

The whole point is alignment. Agents, investors, lenders, title, contractors, property managers — all implementing AI systems and best practices together, streamlining, so our systems actually talk to each other and we work like one team instead of fifteen competing ones. Back in Whatever Happened to Amelia Earhart? I told you to get your top five people in the same room every month. This is that, on purpose, every month.

Iron sharpens iron. Empty chairs don't.

So here's my question for you, whether you run a group, a team, a brokerage, or just your own business: if knowledge is free now, what are you giving people that they can't get from their phone?

Hit reply and tell me in one sentence. The best answers might help shape what we build in December.

Free tools for Louisville buyers, sellers and investors, no sign-up and no email wall: the investment property analyzer, the BRRRR calculator, the Kentucky seller and buyer closing cost calculators, and a lot more on the tools page.

Know somebody who'd like this in their inbox every morning? Send them your personal link. One friend signs up and you get my daily Top Five. Three friends and you get Insider Access.

📊 Yesterday's poll: A Louisville home has been for sale for seven months. What's your opening offer? 42% of you said 15% or more under. Full price and 5 to 10% under tied at 25% each. And 8% of you will be in Vice City. Respect.

I promised you what homes like that actually sold for, so I pulled every one. Over the last 12 months, 112 Jefferson County homes sat on the market seven months or more and finally sold. The typical one closed about 8% under its original asking price. Three out of four had already cut the price at least once before they sold. Only 15% ever got their original number, and 27% sold for 15% or more under it.

Here's the catch. Against the price they'd already cut down to, most of them sold for about 98%. Only 6% went for 15% or more under that latest price. So the big discount is real, but it mostly happens before you show up. The price cuts do the heavy lifting.

Same house. Different frame. Lowball the original number all day long, but if you open 15% under today's price, expect a counter.

Today's poll:

Results in tomorrow's issue.

If you'd rather watch it: why out-of-state investors keep buying in Louisville and Southern Indiana, from the Winner Realty channel.

🏆 The Top Five is ready as always — five real deals on the Louisville MLS this morning, five lowball setups, and my math on every one. I can't blast other agents' listings to a list, but I can send them to you personally. Reply "FIVE" if you want today's.

With Enthusiasm,
Rob Bergeron

Owner–Realtor at Award-Winning Winner Realty
Winner Realty: (502) 305-8915
Winner Realty | OffMarket.deals | Property Partner Data Company

Schedule time to discuss your goals, bottlenecks, or whatever’s on your mind — book me here.

The Morning Bergeron daily track playlist

Speaking of podcasts with better chairs: I was just on ICONS of Real Estate with Robert Kennedy III. We got into what to do when the bank says no, the creative financing that actually gets deals closed, and how I build a buyers list by working with my competitors instead of fighting them. Watch it right here, or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

PS: Full honesty. I've cut way back on going to the larger meetups myself. These days I'd rather put a meeting or a hangout on the calendar with a few smart, curious, dope people in this industry. That's where the magic is being made for me of late.

So that's what we're building. Less surface-level. More aligning goals, getting everybody streamlined, and making everything as efficient as it can possibly be. All ships rise. We want to work with good people, and we want to be able to recommend good people. And we'll go in-depth on whatever we feel like that month.

That's all you get for now. December.

PSS: For the agents reading this. NAR (the National Association of REALTORS) put out a report on agent movement on October 16, and a few numbers jumped out at me. When an agent leaves a brokerage, 34% of the time they're not leaving the business. They're going to another company. Nearly a quarter of agents with 6 to 10 years in the business joined their current brokerage within the last year. And 35% of firms say they're actively recruiting right now.

Moving is normal. Good agents move when the brokerage stops moving with them. Same lesson as the meetups: if the value isn't there anymore, people quietly stop showing up.

If you're wondering whether your brokerage is still leading with value, here's what it looks like at Winner Realty: fresh residential and commercial leads in your inbox at 6:30 every morning, an 85/15 split, and real help building AI systems instead of a slide about AI. Take a look at how Winner works or grab a time on my calendar. I like talking to agents.

PSSS: Something to shop while you think about all this. Every one of these is clickable, so go be curious.

All 17 Winner Realty listings — ours, every price point, active and under contract.

31 motivated sellers — houses and small commercial buildings on the Louisville MLS where the listing itself says "motivated," "bring all offers," "priced to sell," or "must sell." They told you. Believe them.

133 price cuts in four days — Jefferson County homes that dropped their price between last Thursday and Monday alone. Priciest first.

81 homes with 4 or 5 bedrooms under $200,000 — big houses, small prices, cheapest first. Room for a family, a house hack, or a rental with a lot of bedrooms to rent.

15 multifamily buildings under $60,000 a door — every size on the MLS, duplexes up to a 9-unit, where the price divided by the units comes in under $60K.

And the bigger stuff: KCREA, Kentucky's commercial property search site, had 22 multifamily buildings for sale under $60,000 a unit when I pulled it. Go to kcrea.com/listings, set Type to Sale and Use to Multifamily, then open All filters, go to Multifamily, and put $60,000 in the max price per unit box.

See something you like? Hit me up! We’ll get the ball rolling!