The northern Virginia real estate market has come back to reality in a big way for 2007. It is a buyers market and prices have receded back to 2004/2005 levels. It is a great time to be a buyer indeed!
Buyers have it made! Homes priced aggressively are still selling at a brisk pace, problem is getting sellers to price aggressively.
Too many sellers are not willing to accept where we are as a market and want to price their home too high. If you can get the pricing right, it seems too many then do not want to negotiate and lose sale after sale. A recent case in point, I have a home on the market for $350,000 and we received a contract for $340,000 after just 8 days on the market but the seller came back at full price so the buyer walked. I counseled the seller when listing the home that buyers in our market are asking and getting 1-3% in closing concessions. This offer asked for none and the discount in price was less than the 3% I warned the seller about. Needless to say, this buyer moved on to a new seller who was willing to negotiate.
Ironically this seller is also looking to purchase and has found a home they would like to buy. Rather than waiting until their home has a contract, they want to look now and write an offer. They want to offer the seller $15,000 less than list price and include a home sale contingency. They were unwilling to lower their price by $10,000 for a non-contingent buyer and can't understand why the seller of the home they would like to buy won't come down $15,000.
There simply is no way to fully understand the thought process behind every single persons decisions, but in a buyers market you must be flexible with negotiating if you want the job done.
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