A housing market that's not one flavor
In my story today about area home sales in March, agents and buyers talk about a dynamic in the market that one might assume had disappeared months and 10,000 headlines ago: Sellers asking for housing-boom prices. Yes, two years into the slump.
Some of it might be sheer stubbornness. People selling after a year-and-a-half or two of ownership, on the other hand, could be trying to avoid bringing money to the settlement table to cover the difference between what they owe and what a buyer will pay.
But the other side to this? Not everyone's pricing that way:
Mike and Colleen Sacca, who sold their Bel Air townhouse in January and moved in with relatives while searching for a single-family house, have seen both aspects of the market. In three months of looking in the $320,000 to $350,000 range, they checked out homes that were clearly priced too high. But they were outbid twice on homes that were "great deals," Mike Sacca said.
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Comments
I'm sorry, but there's some great comedy when you read comments from the real estate agent and seller side of this.
The fact that some of us are looking at houses but won't buy doesn't make us "confused"; it means that we're expecting a lower price and not getting it, so we'll simply wait until the sellers have had enough and cave in by lowering these ridiculous housing prices.
Silly realtors.
Posted by: Ron | April 11, 2008 10:20 AM
Great point Ron. My wife and I have been looking for the past 6 months. We've gone through 2 buying agents, who I guess have given up on us because we never found anything in that time. The first just stopped returning phone calls.
I guess they think that we're not serious, but it really boils down to the fact that I'm not overpaying for a house. I'm sorry, but a 300% return in 7 years without improvements on the property might have happened a few years back, but not today.
Posted by: baltbuyer | April 11, 2008 12:34 PM
The problem is that realtors were all caught up in this bubble. They were all making huge amounts of money and figured that everyone makes 125k a year in Baltimore. So when 100% financing and no doc(liar) loans from speculators went away so did the sales.
Give it a year and the market will come around. The only people that should be listing by then are people that have no sell not people putting them out on the market with the "wishing" prices that the house around the corner picked up 2-3 years ago at the top of the fraudulent lending practices
Posted by: Adam | April 11, 2008 5:00 PM