Best time to buy

Best time to be a buyer?

by John Rice

It is right now.

Why?

Real estate is like traffic.  Do you want to be driving on Nicholasville Road at 2:PM or 5:PM?  Timing makes a huge difference.  This might be a bad example because personally, I don’t want to be on Nicholasville Road at ANY time of the day.

At 2:PM there is still a lot of people on the road, but fewer drivers.  By 5:PM, everybody who is going to be on that road IS on that road.

In the market, spring and summer are when there are the most buyers out snatching up houses.  It starts to slow down some about the time school starts.  Then it slows down more around Thanksgiving.  Then it really slows down around Christmas.  Then in January it starts picking up again.

We are in that sweet spot where buyer activity will be slowing down some and we are also seeing a good amount of new listings too.   Later in the year, buyer activity will slow down more, but there won’t be as many houses.  It will be like driving down Nicholasville Road in the middle of the night…..sure, there is no traffic, but that is because nothing except Wal-Mart and a few gas stations are open.

Also, sellers tend to get a little nervous the later in the year it gets.  The Lexington sales graph is like a gentle rolling hill.  It gently rises to it’s peak in the late spring and early summer and settles down in the fall/winter.  Some of the surrounding counties look like Mt. Everest.  Their market is dead, then they have 3 months of steep sales increases, then decrease back down to nearly nothing in the fall and winter.  Most sellers assume fall and winter are bad times to sell and plan accordingly, but it is a non-issue for Fayette Co sellers.

We still are likely to have more buyers than houses in the sub $250k range, so I am definitely not saying that it is going to change to a buyers market, just that you may actually have a chance of buying a house without competing with 5 other offers.  Over $250k with the exception of the most popular neighborhoods, you have a better chance of not getting in multiple offers this time of the year.

So be encouraged if you are a buyer and go get you a house!

Reading the tea leaves when your house isn’t selling

by John Rice

House not selling? Wondering how to interpret what is going on? Here are a few of my thoughts on some common situations. The following assumes your house is being presented well online with plenty of good pictures and marketing remarks that describe it with more than trendy generic AI generated verbiage.

The house that gets lots of showings but no offers

Assuming that you don’t have some negative that wasn’t obvious like backing to a highway, apartments, or having an Eiffel Tower looking electrical thing in your yard, this situation simply means that the house doesn’t live up to what buyers expected. The good news with this one is that buyers think the price for what they thought the house would be is okay or else they wouldn’t come at all. The solution here is to either lower the price or improve the house so that it meets the expectations buyers have. Whichever is easiest.

I once had a condo that got tons of showings. I kept encouraging the seller to paint. Once we did, it sold. I recently had another listing that was getting tons of showings. It was a nice place, but just felt like a 15 year old house that needed a fresh vibe. The seller did some painting and replaced the flooring in all the bathrooms. As soon as it was done, it sold. Both of these places looked great online, and just needed to match what buyers thought they were getting. Both were improved for far less than the price reduction we would have needed, so both sellers actually came out better by going that route.

The house that gets no showings

This one is easy, but hard for sellers to accept. The price is too high. If a house is presented well on the MLS, and still nobody comes to see it, all you can do is lower the price. Real estate is all about price, location, and condition. You can’t change the location, but the other two you have some control over.

Also something to think about is this: If you have a $400k house and you’re asking $475k for it, buyers are comparing it to other houses that are really worth the asking price. The buyers who are going to spend what your house is really worth aren’t even going to see it since the list price is over their budget.

The house that gets the same bad feedback over and over

This is the least fun thing that can happen to a seller. I mean, they get kicked out of their house for showing after showing with no offers AND get to hear what people hate about their house.

Several years ago I had this really cool older house that had been mostly remodeled. It had the smallest living room I have ever seen……must have been the smallest anybody had ever seen since that is all I kept hearing after the showings. I’d ask for feedback and the buyer’s realtor would go on and on about how beautiful the place was, how unexpected it was to have walk-in closets in such an old house….then they would say their client wasn’t going to buy it since the living room was so small.

We tried putting in smaller scale furniture, but that didn’t help. After that, all we could do was drop the price. A price reduction opens the house up to a larger pool of buyers as well as enticing them to overlook a shortcoming if they are getting a better deal. We got that one sold too.

If you have a situation that doesn’t fit into these scenarios, give me a shout and I’ll let you know what to do.