It’s Friday desk clearing time for this blogger. “‘In my 22 years experience, I’ve never seen it move as fast as it was. I mean, back in Easter, every deal I had was multiple offers. You know, few months later, it’s crickets. I mean, I have hardly any showings or any offers. So the buyers are just sitting there,’ said Realmark Realty Broker Ted Stout of Cape Coral.”
“‘Sellers kind of have a fear of missing out and they know the market has changed,’ said Alex Platt with Compass in Boca Raton. ‘We have to re-teach [sellers] how to price a home correctly,’ said Jeff Lichtenstein, with Echo Fine Properties in Palm Beach Gardens. ‘They might to price it at $685,000 let’s say, but the real price should be $650,000. They could get away with that in the past because there was no inventory and a buyer would see it because there wasn’t anything out there.’”
“Too much aggressiveness in pricing can be reflected in price cuts: For West Palm Beach, 20% of homes for sale had a price reduction, up from 12% last year, according to Redfin. In Fort Lauderdale, 15% of homes had a price reduction, up from 11% the same time last year. In Miami, 13.7% of homes had a price reduction, an increase from 8% last year.”
“‘Just in the last 45 days, it’s a whole new market,’ said Quentin Dane, a real-estate agent in Raleigh, N.C. The number of new leads coming into his brokerage has dropped by half, he said, and the inventory of homes for sale has increased. ‘We’re definitely seeing buyers take a breath,’ he said.”
“Nicholas Brooks and Nathan Giddings put their four-bedroom, 2.5-bath house in Flower Mound, Texas, roughly 20 miles northwest of Dallas, on the market in early June for $575,000 and got several offers. They ended up accepting a $645,000 bid, but it fell apart soon after. The couple, which now live in Portland, Maine, relisted the house a few weeks later, but ended up accepting a $615,000 offer. ‘We started super-optimistic, we got a ton of offers over asking and then clearly a month later it was a couple of offers and much less,’ said Brooks, a systems analyst. ‘We definitely thought if we left it on the market the offers would get lower and lower.’”
“‘Sellers are having to drop their price to more realistic terms or kind of a little bit under where they want it to be,’ said Jessie Rittenhouse, an agent with Century 21 in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area .In addition, sellers are sometimes offering to pay buyers’ closing costs or to give them thousands of dollars to offset the impact of higher mortgage rates, Rittenhouse said.”
“The last two years have been a whirlwind for Spokane’s real estate market. But now there’s speculation of a real estate correction for the Lilac City. Murphy said, ‘What we had was so abnormal and so crazy. I’ve heard it as this way: It’s kind of like a party. You can’t party all night long, right? Morning has to come. You have to go back to a normal state. It can’t be that crazy for that long.’ Other cities listed in the top five markets for housing price drops in 2023 include Reno, Nev. and Honolulu, Hawaii.”
“New data shows that home sales across the Wasatch Front are continuing to slow as new listings continue growing. This past June, Salt Lake County home sales have hit the lowest amount in a decade, falling 27% lower than in June 2021. This marked a new 10-year low for the county. Yet despite dropping sales, Salt Lake City saw one of the largest increases in new home inventory in the nation. ‘Rising inventories will begin to favor home buyers,’ says the Salt Lake Board of Realtors. ‘In addition to more houses for sale, last year was a record-breaking year in the number of residential permits issued in the state of Utah, helping to erase a statewide cumulative housing shortage.’”
“Chandler already had more than three times the number of homes on the market than it had a year ago as prices across the Valley are falling at a faster-than-expected rate, according to The Cromford Report. ‘Astute sellers will realize that the situation is very fluid and slipping away from them,’ the report said. ‘Prices are reacting much more quickly to the poor market conditions than we expected,’ it said of the Valley-wide housing scene.”
“‘In 2005 and 2006, it took a long time for prices to change direction. In 2022, the change has happened almost overnight. This is probably because people are primed to believe price drops are likely whereas in 2005 most people still believed that home prices never go down. Whatever the reason, sellers in 2022 have been willing to make quick and frequent cuts in their asking prices and accept offers well below those.’ Cromford also predicted prices would continue to fall until demand picks up. ‘Pressures to sell at lower prices are coming from the sellers themselves,’ it said. ‘Low demand mean they are competing with other sellers and a lower price is an obvious tool for them.’”
“The median price of an existing, single-family home in the Los Angeles metro area was $780,000 in July — down from $800,000 in June, the California Association of Realtors reported. Los Angeles County trended in the same direction over the last month, with the median price dropping to $846,320 — down from $860,230 in June. The median price in Orange County was $1.231 million in July, down from $1.265 million in June. San Diego County’s median price dropped from $950,000 in June to $930,000 in July. Riverside County’s median price in July was $625,000, down from $645,000 in June.”
“‘Home sales have taken a trouncing as the market has shifted in response to the recent surge in interest rates, and pending sales suggest that the market could remain soft in August,’ said CAR Chief Economist Jordan Levine.”
“‘We hear it every day: ‘We just want to see where the market is headed,’ Suzanne Seini, CEO of Irvine-based Active Realty Inc., said of today’s home shoppers. ‘There are not as many buyers now.’ Locally, 20.6% of July escrows fell through in the Inland Empire, followed by 18% in Los Angeles County and 16.4% in Orange County, the report said. ‘The looming recession has buyers on the edge of their seats, fully aware that the housing market has slowed considerably,’ ‘Reports on Housing’ author Steve Thomas wrote in his latest commentary. ‘Homes are taking a lot longer to sell. The number of price reductions has surged higher in the past couple of months. As a result, many buyers sit on the sidelines waiting for prices to plunge.’”
“Alexis Victor, real estate agent with Royal LePage Signature Realty, says investors are aggressively pitching lowball offers for cottage properties in areas around Orillia, Ont., Ramara Township and the Kawartha Lakes northeast of Toronto. Sales and prices have already fallen steeply, she says. ‘It’s such a jaw-dropper,’ Ms.Victor says of the rapid decline. ‘You have to go back almost a full year to price a property now.’”
“The median price in areas around Ramara fell for five months in a row to $680,000 in July from $875,000 in February, according to Information Technology Systems Ontario. ‘Initially, there was a lot of panic,’ she says, as homeowners who were contemplating a sale heard about declining prices. ‘Some properties were getting no showings.’ But many owners are resolute about not selling below a fixed price. ‘Sellers are aggressively hanging on,’ she says. ‘The buyers say, ‘We’ll just wait until they come around.’”
“Paul Maranger and Christian Vermast of Sotheby’s International Realty Canada say cottage and country home listings are likely to swell if the economy worsens because owners are more likely to sell an ancillary property if they are stretched financially. Mr. Maranger, who has a background in banking, says lenders are more conservative in providing mortgages for vacation homes – especially in uncertain times. ‘They first will tighten their policies on cottages,’ he says, and that could lead to more inventory in those areas.”
“As for the buyers in the current market, Ms. Victor says investors are keenly watching for deals on cottages and waterfront homes. ‘I don’t have any cottage buyers – not one. They are all investors.’ She points to one renovated home she listed with an asking price of $1.345-million in May. When the property didn’t sell, she made a ‘harsh correction’ to the price and reduced it to $1.16-million.”
“Even then, showings were few. Finally, Ms. Victor began receiving lowball offers in the mid-$900,000s. The property sold conditionally in early August. Ms.Victor says many investors are offering $100,000 to $150,000 below the asking price of a property. ‘They offend the sellers. The sellers are not interested in working with them,’ she says.”
“Ms. Victor has one property on Fawn Bay Road in Orillia for sale with an asking price of $965,000. The owners are patient because the renovated three-bedroom cottage overlooking Lake Couchiching is in high demand on the rental market. ‘Ideally they would like to sell it, but they’re not going to sell it unless they get a reasonable price,’ she says.”