I’m around people in social situations all the time – I have been to my fair share of baseball games, football equipment pickup, coffee houses and graduation parties lately. Inevitably, the subject of work crops up and the first thing people ask after I tell them I’m in real estate is, “How’s the market doing?”
Here are my general answers this month.
I have seen a great increase in buyers looking at my 10 listings. Some homes have had as many as 5 showings in one day!
When I call for agent feedback the answer is either the home I represent is in their top three favorites or they have picked another home to bid on. Either way, I like that answer much better than the one I heard 2 months ago (we’re still looking). This means people are making decisions and buying something. I wish it was one of my listings (and so do my sellers) but at least people are buying. That is a very good sign. We need to burn through the current inventory.
Speaking of current inventory, there is a lot of it out there right now. There are 490 single family homes on the market in Wheaton and 403 in Glen Ellyn. Glen Ellyn has more active condos/townhomes at 191 and Wheaton has 166 available. That is an amazing amount for buyers to look at. There can be as many as 50 homes in a single $50,000 price range!
Buyers these days know they are in high demand. They know which sellers have been on the market a long time, which home is headed toward foreclosure and how the other homes compare to it.
This leads me to my next point and it’s not a pretty one for sellers. I have been seeing agents and buyers come in with really low offers (some as low as 89% of asking price). They put out the offer and see how low they can get the house for. If they don’t feel the number is low enough, they move on to the next home hoping the seller is read to give them a bargain.
So, the good news is people are buying homes; the bad news is that they want a deal – now more than ever.
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