real estate listings

What’s a Buyer to do in this evolving crazy market?

by John Rice

When the market started heating up, the smart buyer’s agent knew to get an offer in ASAP to try to beat other agents to the punch.

Then we all started doing something like saying “Reviewing offers on such and such date and time.” That was nice because you knew that you had time to show the house. If your client couldn’t break away to see it immediately, you could tell them you could do the next day.

Now it has evolved to the point where we are saying “Reviewing offers on such and such date but the seller reserves the right to accept any offer at any time.” So we are back to dropping everything and rushing out to see a new listing ASAP.

What is a poor buyer to do right now to get a house? Make such a strong offer that the seller will want to accept it immediately. Turn the tables and make the Seller chase you! That usually involves 4 big things: Price, inspection, closing date and possession date.

Obviously for price, that means a stupid high number. I can’t believe after spending so many years blogging about not overpaying in a Buyer’s Market, that I am now suggesting people do this. But in this market, it is the difference between getting a home and not getting a home. Instead of “Go big or go home”, it is “Go big to GET a home.”

Inspection…..waive it totally if you can let yourself do it. Having dealt with probably close to 1000 inspections over the past 16 years, I can tell you that I rarely see a house with a deal breaking problem. Most of the issues that would make you want to walk away from the house are typically visible if you look. If it has old HVAC units, well, you know you will have to eventually replace them. Roof have a shingle blown up or need some flashing around a chimney? That’s not worth losing a house over. Plus, most of the time all you can get a seller to do these days is spend $1000 or so on repairs. Most of the items found on a home inspection will probably also be found where you are living now: Some electrical oddities like reversed polarity or an ungrounded outlet in older homes. Various plumbing leaks. A roof, HVAC units or water heater somewhere between new and needing replaced. Most of what is found on a home inspection is deferred maintenance.

A lot of sellers have already bought another home and know when they will be closing on it. Ask their agent what the ideal closing date would be for the sellers. If you can make it work, you have just made your offer much more appealing to them.

Same with the possession date. It’s a pain in the rear to have to be out of your old place the same day you get in your new place. If the house was in reasonably clean shape when you saw it and you don’t think the sellers are terrible people, ask if they need a couple of days to stay in the house after the closing. Some breathing room is always nice. The worst I have seen when this happens is that you often get left some garbage or a dirty house. Most sellers are eager to get to their new place so you don’t really have to worry about them not moving out.

All of these things are a little risky to a buyer. I know. I get it. But the people that do these things are the ones who are going to be moving into that house you fell in love with and were outbid on.

How I have benefited from having the smartest Dad in the whole world.

by John Rice

It’s been a good week.

It all started when I had two buyers make offers on houses and they both got them. Both went over the list price of course as that is becoming far more common.

One of them was a house that had come back on the market after a sale fell apart. I called the listing realtor and asked why it fell apart. She told me that before the seller put the house on the market, he had a specific home inspector look over the house and repaired everything the inspector found. Well, the first buyer used a different home inspector and decided they didn’t want the house. The listing agent thought the buyer just cold feet and used the inspection as a way of getting out of the deal. That happens unfortunately.

I know nobody likes it when a house comes back on the market. The house often doesn’t have the same momentum the second time. I also know that sellers start getting nervous about selling their house even in this crazy hot market. It turns out that my buyer had told me who she was planning on using for the inspection and it was the same inspection company the seller had used. I saw this as an advantage. I knew it would be a huge deal to the seller and listing realtor if they knew we were planning on using the same company since there would be no surprises.

So, instead of writing an offer with an escalation clause, I called up the listing realtor and pretty much said “Hey, how about we give you so much above the last contract you had on the house AND we agree to use the same home inspection company your seller used before they listed it? Would that keep you from waiting to get more offers and just sell it to us right now?” Fortunately it was and my buyer got the house. She later told me she was prepared to go to a certain number if needed and that I saved her a lot of money. Close to $18k to be exact. Had it gone into multiple offers, odds are she would have paid much more than she did. I just knew what to do to make the seller accept our offer. My dad always said “Think like the other person’s perspective.” I knew the seller was anxious about the home inspection after the sale fell apart and having the same company he used do our inspection would make him feel like the house was really going to sell this time……thanks Dad and Happy Father’s Day!

What happens when we do see more houses for sale?

by John Rice

I read a lot of news about real estate. It is always a little funny to me to see what people who are not realtors have to say about the market. There are two things that I have read this week that have me rolling my eyes.

The first one is the headlines about how the number of sales have been declining. Gee, that’s just what happens when there are so few houses for sale. This does NOT mean that buyers are deciding not to buy a house. It means that they can’t get a house.

The other one is that it seems there is a projection that we should have more houses for sale later this year than we have in a long time. That would be great but let me tell you what it doesn’t mean. It doesn’t mean that prices are going to drop. They might stabilize prices a bit but when a hot new listing in Lexington can easily get 15 offers, we would need 15 times the listings for a balanced market. There is going to be more buyers than houses for a while.

A lot of the people who are fantasizing about what that market might look like are not old enough to have lived through the housing crash during The Great Recession. Back then we had more houses for sale than ever and do you know what? The best houses still sold fast and often in multiple offers. Do you know why? It is because everybody wants the best house in their price range. We could triple the number of houses for sale today and it wouldn’t change much. What would happen would be that the best houses sell fast and for top dollar while every other house languishes on the market. This flood of new inventory does not mean that every buyer will be able to get their ideal home.

The market is crazy but being a realtor isn’t

by John Rice

Everybody knows how crazy the real estate market is right now. Everybody I meet wants to talk about it. Everybody assumes every realtor is crazy busy right now. We are not. The reason is because you need houses to be on the market in order to sell one.

It’s super easy being the listing realtor right now. You put a house on the market and have a busy couple of days getting offers, then it is over. Being a buyer’s agent these days is a lot about waiting for a house to come on the market, then rushing out to see it. I used to show houses 3 nights a week and all day long every weekend when it was a Buyer’s market. I think the last house I showed was mid last week. Back then, people would look at 20-30 houses before making a decision. Today a lot of people are viewing 3-4 houses and picking one. I have sold many where the buyer bought the first house they saw. I’ve got plenty of buyers. Some of them are looking for a very specific home in a specific school district or neighborhood. I have worked with one of them for about a year and only shown them 6-7 houses. That’s because so few houses have hit the market in their price range and in the neighborhoods that will work for them.

So being a realtor right now is a lot of waiting. Waiting for sellers to get their homes ready to list. Waiting for the right house for your buyer…….waiting for something interesting to happen so you can blog about it.

How to price your house in this crazy market

by John Rice

Everybody knows that it is the craziest seller’s market ever.

Everybody knows houses are selling for over the list price.

What a seller does with this information is often all wrong. Sellers think they need to price their house as high as they can to get the most out of it. That is totally wrong today.

Today the list price is really just an opener, similar to an auction. Imagine if you went to an auction and the auctioneer began with the number that would be the same as the sale price at the end of the auction? How many bidders would you have? Maybe one? Maybe none? This is effectively what a seller does when they start too high.

I showed a house a few days ago that was listed for $185k, which is pretty high for what it was. There was a line of people waiting to get in to see it. This morning I got an email from the listing agent that they had “An” offer. A few days on the market and they get one offer from all those showings. Had they started at something more reasonable like $175k, they might have ended up at $185k or more. Why? Because buyers are used to going over the asking price these days. When you start at the number they would be willing to pay, they assume they would need to go over that to get the house and are not willing to do so. To a buyer, a list price of $185k means expect to pay $190-195k or more.

The best strategy today is to price the house in line with the most recent comps and create a multiple offer situation. The only way to take advantage of the buyer frenzy is to have two or more people trying to outbid each other for your house. Pricing it high and only having one buyer would be just like going to an auction where there is only one bidder in the room. This is why the success of an auction depends on having maximum exposure for a brief period and then setting a deadline for the sale.