Agent Will

I think it’s become apparent to all that we are in a balanced market. What does that mean? Well, it means that after years of sellers calling the shots the buyers are now becoming more in control. Two parties can sit down across from each other and neither is going to dictate how things will progress. Everything is nice and in balance. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

No.

In my opinion there is no such thing as a balanced market. Well, there is but it is so fleeting as to be missed by all concerned. Markets are black and white, hot or cold, in vogue or out of style, with buyers and sellers. Two sides diametrically opposed each with their own goals and designs.

For years we had limited supply and lots of buyers looking for the same thing and at the mercy of the sellers. Buyers felt the need to buy (that’s very important to the buying process). Sellers, for the most part, did not feel the need to sell. They priced whatever they wanted and either sold quickly or waited for the market to catch up to them. Buyers, more often than not, paid premiums to buy. There were some pretty spectacular frenzies that went on with people taking time off work to line up and ciew the first showing on a Thursday afternoon (personal experience).

Those days are over.

What we are seeing, and to those of you who watch the weekly stats here this will come as no surprise, is that listings are climbing at a very high rate (though we are still at a very low 42% of listings being vacant or tenanted property rate) while sales are dropping (the past week was an astounding 25% of new listings). Price drops are occurring and still people are not buying. Open houses (a poor way to sell homes in any market) are being visited by maybe one or two curious parties over a two hour span. This is no balanced market.

You see, what happens when the market sentiment shifts (and that is all this is, rates are low and nothing else has changed) it doesn’t creep. It swings the other way quickly. It is a full fledged buyers market right now. Either you want to buy or you don’t. There is no maybe. Scratch that. There is if they view the place as a real steal of a deal (and there are ways to manufacture that).

You can argue that this is a sudden turn of events but it is not. It’s been heading this way for the past six months. The spring boom never materialized. Yes, there are pockets of wild activity still happening and there always will be but in the broadest market sense this is a buyers market and that will become more apparent if the trend continues.

Don’t shoot the messenger. Learn from it and prepare yourself.

You can either lead or fall behind as a seller in this market. If you just “kinda want to but are not sure maybe though I don’t know could” sell then you are not prepared. If you absolutely, positively, want to sell then be smart about it. Price it right, be open to offers and be prepared to negotiate. When you do get an offer that is acceptable then make sure the contract is tight without the little loopholes that allowed a buyer to get out before (those were rampant during the boom). If you don’t know what I am talking about then you need an education on these matters.

This is not to shock you. Remember, the days on market for sales is still a boom-like low of about 35 days. Unfortunately that’s only for sales. The days on market for active properties is climbing rapidly and so are the number of expiries. In fact, the number of expiries has, for the first time this year, exceeded the number of sales (at the end of April and again this past week). You now have about a 1.5% (yes, one point five percent) chance of selling in less than a month. Why do you want to do that? Because you don’t know what the next month will bring. No one does. But you can take some pretty good guesses.

This trend will continue for quite some time as, I bet, sellers will not be willing to accept that prices are not increasing.

If you’re selling then there is just one question I got for you: “Do you want to sell?”