real estate listings

19 0ffers and $40k over list-Fun getting the most for my seller

by John Rice

It’s been an exciting past few days.

This story begins one rainy Friday when I was on my way to a Radwood Car Show in Cleveland with my son. I got a text from a repeat client who I have become friends with. She tells me that her mother is going in assisted living and she wants me to sell her mother’s house.

After a few months, the house was ready to list. Unfortunately the market had really started to cool off since we first discussed the sale.

Full disclosure here…..I don’t think any realtor right now really knows how to price a house unless there are good comparable sales from the past 8 weeks. We usually look back 6 months for comparable sales. Six months ago the market was on fire. That market doesn’t exist today. Gone. Interest rates have nearly doubled. We are all, if we were to be honest with ourselves and the public, shooting from the hip on pricing right now. The market has changed so fast that we lack good data on pricing from this “New” market.

Since the absolute worst thing you can do in any market is to overprice a house, I suggested we put it on at a number I was 100% sure we could get and also expect multiple offers. That number was $185k. I was really hoping we might get multiple offers and I could drive the price up to maybe $200k but I didn’t tell this to my friend.

One investor heard about the upcoming listing and contacted me. I let him and his realtor show it the day before it hit the market. I told them that we wanted to expose the house to the market before deciding. They of course wrote a full price offer and wanted an immediate response. I told my seller that I was sure we could duplicate that offer from anybody since it was nothing special. She agreed.

I put the listing on the market very late Friday night. Immediately it started getting showing requests. By 9:AM the next morning, more than a dozen showings were scheduled. I spent all day Saturday, Sunday and Monday texting and talking to the 72 agents who had scheduled showings on this house. It was overwhelming.

Once the offers started coming it, I went to work on pushing the price up. With every new offer we got, I told the realtor if there was another offer with better terms for price, inspection type, financing type and closing date. The goal is to create the ideal terms for your seller by getting one buyer to change something on their offer so you can use that for leverage to get another buyer to change something.

We ended up with 19 offers. We had two cash ones that were very close (especially after I nudged each one of them to go higher to be competitive.) I think one of them figured out I was using their offer to push the other one up higher, and then come back to push them up again. This agent send me a Confidentiality Agreement. That is where one of the terms of their offer is that you can’t disclose any of their offer terms to anybody else. I won’t violate my integrity. In addition to experience, all I have to offer people is trust. I felt like both would go a little higher. What to do? How could I squeeze a little more money out of them for my elderly seller who needed it to live on? I decided to tell each of those two buyers they had the best offers and to send me their highest and best offer. They had one shot. The seller would pick the best one. This move ended up getting about another $4k for the seller.

In the end, the house sold for $225,750. Just over $40k more than the list price.

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.

Don’t believe the Chicken Littles in the media

by John Rice

I love YouTubers. Always a good laugh. Always predicting the market is going to crash.

They get a little nugget of data, like that the number of people refinancing their mortgages has dropped and draw the craziest conclusions. Well, when rates were between 2 and 3%, everybody rushed out to refi. Even if the rates had not gone up, eventually everybody who would have refinanced would have done so. That statistic was bound to decrease on it’s own eventually.

My favorite ones are those that predict a major housing crisis. It is just not going to happen, especially in Lexington.

Why?

The number one reason is that Lexington is almost out of land. Lexington cannot grow any more. The surrounding communities will of course grow. Lexington will always be the most desirable town in the Bluegrass and prices will remain higher than anywhere else around us due to that. (FYI-we will see a whole lot more remodeling in the future than we see building in Lexington.)

What else do I see in the near future? A slowing market, mainly due to interest rates and nothing being for sale. Right now everybody is complaining that 5% interest rates are the worst thing to happen to the market. I disagree. While rates being low were nice, it is the low rates that spoiled all of us and are affecting the market right now. We currently act like rates in the 2-3% range were normal and 5% seems excessively high. However, I don’t see prices dropping though. That’s because all those sellers who refinanced their mortgages when rates were under 3% are not going to move until they have a need. We need sellers in the market. When sellers are scarce, that means more demand than supply. People will likely only move when they outgrow their home, lose a job, get transferred, their family grows, Grandma needs to move in, or a divorce. You’re not going to give up a 3% mortgage on a cheaper house to get a 5% mortgage on a more expensive house unless you really need to move.

So, in Lexington at least, we have little room to build more houses, sellers who are less likely to move just because they want a nicer home, and higher interest rates. All of which means less supply at a time when we have Gen Z trying to get their first home and millenials needing to move up.

I guess if I had a YouTube channel, it would be pretty boring because you don’t get much attention by saying prices will remain at least stable and the market will stay slightly tipped in the seller’s favor.

Appraised value verses Market value

by John Rice

Seems no matter what the market is, I’m explaining the difference between Appraised Value and Market Value.

Many people think whatever the appraiser says their house is worth, is what it is worth. The real value is whatever number a seller and a ready, willing and able buyer agree upon. Appraisers study past buyer/seller behavior and give an opinion of current value.

When the market was bad, I was always explaining how appraised value was usually MORE than market value. It was more like the house’s potential. In this crazy seller’s market, I am sometimes explaining how appraised value is LESS than the market value. A lot of the reason is because market value happens in real time. It is right now. Appraised value is saying what the value should be based on the past.

Just this week, a house I sold for $429k appraised for $417k. As I read over the appraisal report, it became clear to me why it did not appraise for the full sale price. Two of the three comparable sales were 6 months old. In an appreciating market, you must make a value adjustment for this. The appraiser gave the two houses 2 and 2.4% appreciation. We have seen much more appreciation in values than that since last October.

In response, I was able to obtain two other offers the listing realtor got. One was $421k and the other was $427,500. If you average those two offers plus the winning offer of $429k made by my buyer, that is an average of $425k.

The appraiser refused to adjust his opinion of value. This is how appraised value and market value differ. Market value is the 3 ready, willing and able buyers who desperately wanted to purchase this home all agreeing the value is between $421k and $429k. Appraised value, in the case of this home, is some stubborn dude with a big ego who isn’t actually in the market to buy anything cutting and pasting a lot of numbers on a sheet of paper and charging $425 for his outdated opinion.