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“If you’re looking for demons in the American capitalist system, I don’t think you’ll find them with your local real estate broker,” Warren Buffet said on CNBC, weighing in on the class action suit that most agents we’ve spoken with are closely following.
Since so many of you are talking about it online and off, we won’t rehash it here. If you want to learn more about it, check out the story on MarketWatch.com, Inman.com (it’s not behind the paywall, surprisingly) and HousingWire.com.
Instead, we’ll take a quick look at some of the real estate agent news stories you may have missed over the past month.
Do your fence-sitting sellers hear that the market is changing?
“Half of the country’s 100 largest cities are showing signs of change,” according to Brittany de Lea at FoxBusinessNews.com.
Of course, we’ve known this for months, but, as usual, the media is the last to hear about this real estate agent news. Price cuts, days on the market and list-to-sales ratios are all in flux in many areas of the country.
And, we’re not alone; Stockholm, London, Toronto, Sydney, Milan, Geneva, among others, are all seeing shifts in their housing markets.
While the market, overall, “still largely favors sellers,” according to De Lea, it’s expected to become more balanced in the very-near future.
If you have sellers on the fence, help them down by reminding them that their current upper hand in the market will only last so long.
Remind them as well that mortgage rates, while fluctuating, are still at historic lows and they may not be as rate-locked as they assume.
Zillow tells us which home features sell houses
Does anybody else find Zillow’s ‘2019 Home Features that Sell Analysis’ a bit misleading? In their press release about the study, they claim that for-sale listings mentioning ‘steam oven’ or ‘professional appliance’ “sold for up to 34 percent more than expected.”
In fact, homes with steam ovens “saw the highest sale premium of all the keywords analyzed.” They were, however, slower to sell, remaining on the market “22 days longer than similar homes in the same metro and price tier.”
Not once does the author mention “luxury homes,” in connection with this feature, yet even the extended days on the market scream “a steam oven is a luxury home feature!”
In fact, it’s probably safe to say that that you won’t find “steam oven” on the wish lists of most starter home buyers.
The analysis did study starter home features, yet the features they found most profitable were in-demand in the most expensive markets in the country, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
I highly doubt that the starter home in the Bay Area with a wine cellar (the third most profitable keyword for entry-level homes) is anything like what most Americans think of as a “starter home.”
So, while a pot-filler may be in great demand in starter homes in New York City, a young couple purchasing their first home in Des Moines probably has no use for one.
Location, location, location. Funny how it all comes back to that, right?
Real estate agent news – March was a lousy month for new home construction
“U.S. homebuilding dropped to a near two-year low in March,” according to Lisa Mutikani at Reuters.com. She goes on to claim that this suggests “the housing market continued to struggle despite falling mortgage rates.”
Lisa, Lisa, Lisa.
On the very day her piece was published, Andrea Riquier was over at MarketWatch.com telling us that mortgage application rates are skyrocketing, hitting a “nine-year high, even as rates ticked slightly higher.”
This suggests not only that consumer confidence in the market is at all-time highs, but also that the housing market is NOT “struggling.”
It is adjusting in areas across the country, but obviously when mortgage apps hit a nine-year high, the market is far from “struggling.”
It’s irresponsible stories such as this one that scare real estate consumers. And that’s the LAST thing we need in a correcting market.
Your job is to list and sell real estate, not battle against the misconceptions spread by the media.
In a nutshell, real estate markets are adjusting, nationwide. We’ve known this for months, so it’s nothing to freak out about.
This real estate agent news does, however, present an opportunity for listing agents to remind potential clients that they need to get moving NOW, rather than later.
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