In an article in the Real Estate Section of The Washington Post, a guy is described as having really, really researched the market for a long period of time. He had spreadsheets and visited a lot of open houses, etc. He and his lady friend eventually decided to buy a house! Wooooo! Hoooo!
This reminds me of a recent experience where a couple contacted me through my REALTOR.com listing. They liked the house, it had a Virtual Tour so they had and idea what it looked like on the inside and they wanted to see it.
Since I'm the Seller's rep, I wanted to do everything I could to expedite the sale of the house. So that meant meeting people at the house for their own little private showing. Great! I have no problem with that. Especially since this particular listing wasn't that far away and, who knows, maybe this nice couple would turn into nice buyers.
Well, in the process of chatting them up, it turns out they've been looking around at Open Houses and online for over a year. They have their own house to sell (they'll probably use the Realtor who sold them the house originally, thank you very much for asking) and they really haven't decided to use a buyer's agent. So after realizing I was out of the picture I relaxed a bit and we chatted about the neighborhoods, why they were moving, a little about their lifestyle and so on.
It was obvious that theses very pleasant people were "just looking". Kicking the tires to see if there was a house that really sang to them. Of course, if they ever do find "the perfect house" they'll still have to sell their existing home and that could take a bit and "the perfect house" could be sold from under them.
But, hey, it's not for me to advise them. They as much as said so.
So, no matter that we Realtors and virtually every loan officer in the world is screaming "Now is the time to buy!" There are plenty of tire kickers, fence sitters and procrastinators out there just wandering through houses. I guess I should be encouraged that people are wandering at all.
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