real estate advice

How the market is changing

by John Rice

This is hard to believe, but I am busier with buyers than I have been all year. Buyers are out there shopping. Many listings I have shown have another showing taking place as I arrive or one coming in as soon as I am locking the door on my way out. There is a lot of activity. I think buyers are excited to have choices now. They seem excited to get to see so many houses. I showed 6 houses yesterday to one buyer. Six months ago I would shown a buyer one house. If they didn’t buy it, we would wait patiently until the next one came on the market.

Buyers seem to be pushing back a little on price. Only a few I have shown have gotten multiple offers. Also, out of maybe 14 or so houses I have shown in the past 3 days to 3 different buyers, only two of them have sold before I could show them to my clients. Six months ago, that number would have been much higher.

It’s going to be a weird rest of the year I think. It has changed so fast. We will have sellers who aren’t living in reality and think they get to call the shots. There will be realtors who also are stuck in the old market and not realize they need to hone their negotiating skills. There will be buyer’s who think it’s a Black Friday sale and want to offer 80% of the list price. This is when having a good realtor who knows what is going on in real time really helps!

Real estate market-No monster under the bed

by John Rice

Quit reading everything about the housing market……well, maybe except for this post.

There is soooo much doom and gloom in the news out there regarding the market. It’s all written to grab your attention. It’s mostly accurate data just misinterpreted by people who are journalists and not actually in real estate. If you want to know how not to end a sentence in a prepositional phrase, ask a writer. You want to know about the real estate market, ask a realtor.

It drives me crazy how much the news impacts people’s decisions. There are so many people out there right now afraid to buy a house or afraid they should sell their house before the market crashes. I totally get that there is an investment side to homeownership. It is typically somebody’s largest asset and those who own their homes tend to have a higher net worth than those who rent.

But, there is another side and that is the fact that you have to pay to live somewhere. If you rent, somebody owns where you live. If you sell to beat any crash, you will still have to pay to live somewhere.

Since you’ve gotta pay to live somewhere and you’ve gotta have somewhere to live, I have always thought that the best time to buy a house is as soon as you can afford it and your life is stable enough where you expect to live there for at least several years. Possible fluctuating values and interest rates don’t matter as much when viewed against throwing money away in rent. If prices were to dip a little, the money you lose will likely be less than all the rent you would have paid over the same timeline. If rates go down, you can refinance your mortgage. If you currently own and home and are happy living there and it serves it purpose well, then stay put until it doesn’t.

The real estate market is just like any other market. It moves like the waves on a beach. It is always going back and forth. Sometimes the tide comes in, sometimes it goes out. It never stays the same for long and nobody should expect that. You can’t control the timing of the market but you CAN control your time in the market.

What’s the rest of 2022 going to be like?

by John Rice

Not fun, that’s for sure.

After working in bad, good and in between markets over the past 17 years, we are entering a period where buyers and sellers are not going to be happy. Buyers won’t like that they missed out on the super low interest rates. Sellers won’t like that they missed out on the absolute hottest real estate market in all of history.

Here are some predictions:

  1. Pricing a house will become difficult. Typically you look back over the past 6 months of sales of similar houses to determine value. Well, we can’t really justify using comparable sales from when the market was so hot that about any house went for way over the list price and had 5-15 offers.
  2. Price reductions. Let me tell you something. A price reduction does not mean the market is bad. It just means the price wasn’t right from the get go. Sellers will be in denial and will want to keep pricing their houses as if buyer’s can still get a 3% interest rate. Trust me, having been in this business during the absolute work market ever, I can attest to the fact that when priced right, any house will sell quickly in any market.
  3. Home inspectors will have to start waking up and working again after practically being unemployed for the past two years.
  4. Realtors will have a whole lot more free time since the number of sales are slowing. This does not mean the market is bad. What determines a good or bad market is not the number of transactions but the balance between sellers in the market and buyers in the market. Just about everybody other than clickbait Youtubers agree that the market is cooling into a slight seller’s market. If there are 2 sellers out there and 2 buyers out there, that is a good, balanced market. Realtors are the only people that care about the number of transactions out there. Why? Because we get paid for transactions.

Want to know what I expect for 2023?

Assuming rates don’t go crazy and the general economy doesn’t collapse, I think when buyer’s emerge next spring they will have acclimated to inflation, acclimated to paying around 6% interest and they will resume buying houses.

Things to remember in a slowing market

by John Rice

Yea, the market is slowing down. Everybody knows that. No big deal. That crazy roller coaster market couldn’t last forever and I’m sort of glad really. It will still be a good market for years to come, but it will seem like a let down compared to the last couple of years.

Here are some things to remember as you process the Doom and Gloom news cycle real estate is in at the moment.

  1. The “Average Days on Market” will be going up. Don’t be alarmed. Usually the way that works is that the worst houses that nobody wants stay on the market longer and bring down that average. Also, keep in mind that average is usually for all residential property types in all price ranges. If you have a $350k house, do you really care about what the market is like for a million dollar home? Or a townhouse at any price?
  2. The “Average Sale Price” is another one that can confuse people. An average is just that-it’s an average of all sales. If house sales over $500k slow down a lot, it will drag down the average sale price. This does NOT mean your house is worth less when you read silly headlines that say stuff like “The average sale price dropped by 2% last month.” When rates got super low, I saw more houses selling for $1,000,000 or more than I have ever seen. Now that rates are much higher, I totally expect to see sales at that price point slow way down, bringing down the average sale price.
  3. Values may stay flat after going crazy for the past two years, but prices will still go up. I know this sounds crazy, but hear me out. Let’s say you bought a house a year ago for $400k and we have had 8% inflation since then. Your house needs to sell for $432k today for you to have effectively broken even. That’s because it takes 432,000 of today’s deflated dollars to equal 400,000 of dollars a year ago. In other words, the price of your house has to be higher even if it got zero percent appreciation just because the value of the dollar has eroded. (This is a whole other post, but one reason prices have risen so much over the past year is because we saw massive appreciation and massive inflation. If prices went up 15% and inflation was 8% of that, then that means the real appreciation was 7%.)

I started my career just as the Great Recession began. I saw most houses in our area drop in value by 15-20%. I know to a lot of people, this market seems scary. Trust me, it isn’t. All that’s going to happen is that we have a more balanced market. It will be a good, but not the greatest time in history, to be a seller. It will also be good to be a buyer because you will be able to get a house that should be a stable investment for your future.

Who is the most important person in your renovation?

by John Rice

It’s not your contractor. It’s not your designer.

It’s your realtor.

Why?

Because one day you’re gonna want to sell your home. You will want all that time and money you spent on the renovation to have added value. Having a great designer and using the best contractors are wonderful things to do, but only your realtor will know if the work you’ve done added value. And let me tell you, NOTHING you do to your house will get a 100% return on your investment.

Here are some things to think about as you plan a renovation:

  1. Don’t over improve. If you live in a half million dollar neighborhood, don’t pick million dollar neighborhood materials. Yes, buyers will love the unexpected upgrade but you will be effectively giving it to them for free. Always keep the level of materials suitable to what people expect for the price range of the neighborhood.
  2. Don’t add too much square footage. I have seen some crazy additions where people end up with the biggest home in the neighborhood. That’s never a good idea. The buyers that want such a big house will probably want to be in a house surrounded by similar sized homes. The people wanting to be in your neighborhood probably aren’t going to want to pay you top dollar for the extra square footage. Also, appraisers usually give credit for square footage tiered to the price range. That means the more affordable your neighborhood is, the less an appraiser is going to value your excess square footage because they will be using recent sales from the neighborhood for comparisons.
  3. Don’t make crazy compromises. I have seen some wonderful additions but due to the existing floor plan of the house, you have to do something crazy like walk through a laundry room to get to the amazing new space. Buyers don’t like that. Yes, you’ve gotten used to it and it works for you but it will be a deal breaker to a buyer. The flow of the addition is very important.

The bottom line is that you want your house to still fit the character, size and price range of your neighborhood. Be sure to go over your plans with your realtor before committing to the job.