Quorum Call What's Happening in Your Area
The Zoom call this week was a state of the country regarding real estate. Rocky Dickerson moderated the call and started out the session and sought out someone from the call to offer their local market status.
Nick Vandekar, who's market is split between the Greater Philadelphia and northern Delaware areas started out with the observations that there is a significant decrease in new listings coming on in his area. Most MLS systems offer up a daily dashboard of activity and throughout the day it self-updates.
This is based on the criteria established by the individual agent. Where he would see a daily board with 12-15 coming soon as well as 25+ new listings, it has dropped off to 1-2 coming soon and maybe 6 actives. He is hoping it is just a holiday slowdown that will see a resurgence of activity over the next few weeks. There is also the issue as people trying to sell are not seeing opportunities for their purchases.
Nick also offered that like himself, many are moving further out of urban areas as homes are less costly and if in an HOA, the monthly costs are much less costly, most of his is due to the home are new are require less maintenance.
Hannah Williams, who works nearby also interjected that she has seen people taking their homes off market as they are not getting attention.
Rocky Dickerson who works in Las Vegas noted that his MLS system showed a one-day total of 1,200 expired listings on Jan 1. While not uncommon to see a month end bunch of expired listings, there are usually a comparable number of new listings, many the same, but with new agents.
William Piotrowski, a loan officer from Ill, offered that he has had potential clients offer up that they may stay renting as the cost of a monthly mortgage.
He also suggested that we not become owls. As owls are known to hoot who, we shouldn't become run recognized as who's to our sphere: Agent who? when we make a call.
He also offered up that within the new 2-3 years, 2/3's of all millennials are looking to buy a home within the next 2-3 years. This segment is all highly involved with their phone activities, and he suggested we start to make ourselves better known to them.
He discussed an agent that started a year ago with 52 followers on TikTok and started to make and post small videos and within a year of posting about the daily life of an agent increased her followers to over 860,000.
The people that are looking for agent want substance and want to see a real person and not someone that is structured and scripted. He has been reaching out to agents he knows to get their views on the market. As he stated, bottom producers love top markets and top producers love bottom markets.
He was asked to offer up what he is using to get business in this market. He identified himself as a mortgage banker/loan officer as his firm services many loans, so they have a lot of reserve funds
He believes that interest rates won't stabilize until second quarter of 2024 yet would like to see the Federal Reserve just step up and make a stand where interest rates will remain at 5 1/4 for the next 3 years.
He feels investors will control the market as long as people feel they can't buy so they will be paying someone else's mortgage in the way of higher rents.
As Rocky Dickerson interjected that he has seen loan officers offering up loan product that within the term of 6 months to 60 months, that if interest rates are 1/2% lower or more will refinance at no cost to that buyer.
George Souto interjected that his experiences with these programs have been suspect, especially with buyers that look to buy now and will opt for a loan program that allows them to do that, but after a year with a re-set of the loan they find themselves scrambling to pay the mortgage and it carries forward to where after 2-3 years they are in foreclosure mode as incomes have not kept up with inflation.
He is more likely to ask a buyer what they can afford today and use that as the criteria as to what they should be looking to buy, even if it is not a 'dream home'. Reality needs to take a priority over desire, especially if it is their first time buying. He feels this is better as all that is typically available to him is a credit report and not a person's particular lifestyle with regards to comfort spending such as movies, coffee stops, etc.
Both George and William felt that the biggest issue facing buyers today is the debt ratios created by the high costs of goods and services created over the last few years.
This was repeated by several in attendance regarding high energy cost for gas and electric over the nation and even in some states energy options are being denied due to the increase in demands that would be created. These escalating costs would impact abilities to pay mortgages as well as rents.
For market statistics, Dorie Dillard spoke of the trend of the market for her in Austin, TX. Their market saw an up and down in inventory. From the first half of the year, the market bottomed out some through the summer.
In September, their inventories started to shift with high number of homes on market from less inventory:
September 11,000
October 11,000
November 10,238
December 8,730
January 2,609
The state of Texas is large and a multiple MLS state so what is representative of her area may not be similar for other large metropolitan areas.
Dorie sees a good potential for the new year and feels that the agents that will see business will be those that demonstrate their knowledge of the area and let it show though as the experts in the area.
Real estate is cyclic and with the trend in business, professionals and knowledge have an advantage.
It was brought out in the call, that 70% of all agents currently licensed have never worked in a tight market. Also, 80% of all lenders in the business have never worked in a non-refi market.
Quorum Call What's Happening in Your Area
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