Hello friends and associates. This is MARCH, the true beginning of the selling season. Things are getting crazy around here....the competition for homes is cut-throat and real. If you are buying a home, you better have all your ducks in a row....pre-approval in hand, down-payment at the ready, and a good agent that looks at all the new listings constantly and lets you know about them as they come on the market. Good listings under $300,000 are literally selling in hours, and sometimes MINUTES on the market. If you are selling a home, you are licking your chops and wondering just how much you can get for your "in-demand" home. Multiple offers are becoming the norm. I still have buyers that haven't been able to find a home. Those are the conditions where I live. I wonder how they are in your market...always remember, real estate markets are LOCAL! In other words, what you hear on cable news probably isn't what is happening in your backyard.
Earlier in the year, I predicted that we would see about a 3% increase in value this year in northern CO. Well...that might have been a little low. Actually, that might have been a LOT low. We are up around 6% already year over year for median sales price. Now that is only going off January and February numbers, but I can tell you that prices have gone up even more in March. Those numbers will be released next week and I am anxious to see what they show us. Our average sale price is now $271,000, a 14% jump from last year at this time. Some other stats: in Fort Collins, 407 homes have sold in the first 2 months, that is up 43% from last year. That is not a small increase, that is statistically very significant. For single family homes, we are up 70% in total sold volume for the year. 70%!!! Days on market are way down, 20% from last year, to about 108 days on average. That is also going to continue going down. These numbers are the true sign of a seller's market. But for buyers, it is still ok, because even if they have to overpay a bit, the rates remaining extremely low make it smart to buy now as opposed to waiting til the market cools off, at which point I can guarantee that interest rates will be significantly higher.
Just watching what has been happening here makes some people wonder if we will see another bubble. Personally, I don't think so. We are seeing pent up demand, buyers snapping up all these houses, with interest rates remaining low. The key to there not being a bubble is this: the underwriting on home loans is so strict that the odds of default on these loans are so much lower than ever before. In other words, we won't have anything like the wave of foreclosures that occurred in the late 2000s that absolutely wrecked our market. There is more oversight than ever before on the lending industry, and more government loans are being given out. These are highly scrutinized and well underwritten loans, and less likely to be foreclosed on. My buyers these days complain about how tough it is to get through underwriting....and I tell them it is a direct reaction to what happened last decade and it is a good thing, although it is annoying.
Comments (2)Subscribe to CommentsComment