June real estate news you may have missed

Do you really know your listing clients’ top concerns?

Take a tour around the internet – real estate agent blogs in particular – and you’ll find that far too many agents feel that a home seller’s biggest concern is “selling for top dollar.”

Hey, can you blame them? Agents assist in selling a financial asset. One that’s worth a huge amount of money.

But assuming that is their chief concern is a mistake. It leads to writing blog posts that don’t meet their needs, social media posts that miss the mark and money wasted on various forms of marketing.

Apparently, there are other concerns that keep them up at night that have nothing to do with finances.

Recently, Homes.com surveyed home sellers about their top concerns about selling the home. The “financial implications” of the sale most worried only 21 percent of them.

More than twice as many were concerned about “getting the home ready to sell” (43 percent). Emotional aspects of selling a home also scored higher than financial concerns. For instance, 27 percent cited the stress of the moving process as a concern.

Consider this when next you sit down to write a blog post or share what you hope is seller-bait on Facebook.

June real estate news – it’s hyper-local

Those neighborhood market reports you feature in your drip or snail mail campaigns just became even more valuable.

The Haider-Moranis Bulletin, a weekly look at Canada’s real estate market, reported on “recent research” that finds the extent of ‘local’ “may be restricted to the neighborhood level.”

Homebuyers are more interested in a certain neighborhood’s home price trends than for the city at large.

They understand, the authors claim that “Housing values in a mid-income neighborhood will not necessarily respond to fluctuations in prices in a ritzy part of the town.”

Despite all the advanced analytics and mountains of data at the fingertips of the big real estate portals and the iBuyers, they can only drill down to the ZIP Code level. And, as agents know, there are numerous neighborhoods, often with vastly different home prices, within any given ZIP.

Only real estate agents keep track of neighborhood data and that fact, my friend, is yet another way you provide value to the real estate consumer.

Make sure potential clients understand this.

The real estate glass is, as usual, half empty at CNBC

Our favorite Queen of Gloom and Doom is at it again with some June real estate news. CNBC’s Diana Olick adds a postscript to a story about our amazingly low mortgage interest rates (3.87% at this writing) by warning that Trump’s tariffs on Mexico may harm the housing industry.

Apparently, because Mexico supplies 11 percent of the steel in the U.S., “prices of new homes could go higher,” she warns.

While there are other ways to build a home, “most new homes in the U.S. are framed on site using conventional lumber,” according to NewHomeSource.com.

We only mention this because several real estate sites picked up on the story, happy to help spread the imaginary gloom and doom.

Don’t buy into it. The housing market may be “harmed” in the future, but it won’t be by tariffs on Mexico.

Will iBuyers tough out a market slowdown?

I know they bristle at being compared to flippers but I just can’t help it – to me, they’re almost identical.

So, if investors are “heading for the exits,” according to June real estate news from Bloomberg’s Prashant Gopal, will the iBuyers be sticking around, toughing out an expected market slowdown? Despite “shrinking profits, or even losses?”

Don’t look at me – I have no idea. But it’s an interesting question to ponder, doncha think?

Congrats NAR

Never thought I’d ever agree with your association but they finally did something I’ve been begging for: segmented Millennials the way they segment boomers in the Generational Trends report.

Have you read the 2019 report? There’s lots of interesting stuff inside. If you’re a listing agent, you’ll most likely be working with the oldsters in the next year and beyond. A full 50 percent of home sellers are baby boomers and members of the silent generation (age 55 and older).

Gen Xers are the next largest group of home sellers, at 25 percent. Brush up on what these cohorts are looking for, where and how to work with them.

Homebuyers, on the other hand, tend to straddle two generations, with 37 percent members of the millennial generation and 39 percent, the aforementioned older cohort.

Smart agents, whether listers or sellers, will take this June real estate news to heart, and woo our older Americans – helping a client to both sell and buy is a beautiful thing.

 

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