For the last year, we have been warning consumers that the slowdown in the Colorado Real Estate market is coming. At the beginning of this year, our best guess was that the market correction would come in sometime of 2018. There were many signs and signals that pointed us in this direction like interest rates, double digit home value appreciation three or more years in a row, government regulation, and the seven- and ten-year cycles of real estate. I could go on and on pointing out many more factors but maybe the strongest argument is “what goes up must come down”. Remember, the real estate market is a bell curve and the average consumer doesn’t know that we are on the way down to correction before it’s too late. Buyer’s market and seller’s market can last two, three, four years or more. A Balanced market is the shortest in a real estate market, usually not lasting more than a year based on ‘what goes up must go down’ argument.
Last month I was at the Luxury Real Estate conference in Las Vegas, meeting with many of my colleagues from around the nation and I was alarmed by what I was hearing. Easily the theme from the three-day conference was that the slowdown is already occurring. My friends in Florida, California and other parts of the country were telling stories of very slow movement in their luxury market followed by multiple price drops by homeowners in an effort to move their homes. This is exactly how it started back during the crash. Before the average person started to lose their home to foreclosure, the luxury market took the first hit when buyers and money dried up. A friend of mine that works the Sarasota/Fort Meyers area told me that the selling season there is October through April. He said that many high-end sellers put their homes on the market last October, looking for a premium price. By January, there was little activity and people started to panic so they began a series of price drops in hopes of luring in a buyer. Others took their homes off the market and as of the date of writing this article, the luxury market has not recovered there.
Now we may not be feeling that here in Denver yet, but don’t be fooled; IT IS COMING! So, at this time, we here at the Colorado Dream House Team are revising our advice to our clients. We had been telling everyone since the beginning of the year that we were 18 months to two years off from the market correction, but now we are revising that to 12 months. If you are looking to sell your home at the highest price, do it in the next 12 months. If not, then plan on staying put for five years beginning in 2018. I would love to be wrong but we are very conservative with our advice to our clients and we generally make them a lot of money.
Dan Polimino is a Broker/Owner with the Colorado Dream House Team, Keller Williams Realty DTC. Contact the Colorado Dream House Team at 720-446-6325, Follow us on Twitter, Like us on Facebook, Watch us on YouTube, Questions?
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