Market update for August 2022 Santa Cruz edition
Do you think the real estate market is cratering? Interest rates going up and the buyers are going to be able to get a screaming deal and sellers missed out and it’s terrible! Now as a buyer you can just do whatever you want. Like the wild west, you could just go make low offers and sellers have to take your offer, right? Well, I am here to set this notion straight. Currently I have a few listings and I have buyers. It is good to have both buyer and seller because you really get the perspective of what’s truly going on in the market, not just from being a listing agent but being an agent representing buyers too.
I have four examples of where a buyer wrote an offer on my listing and thought that the seller should just take whatever they offer, because darn it that’s the market, and values are going down and they should take it. I have a listing where a buyer wrote a low offer and he told me, “well, values are going down.” He did not get it sellers said “no” Another one was where I had a buyer, who wrote an offer on a property. There was another offer on it, but it was lower. And we managed to squeak them out. My buyers paid list and won. They were serious buyers.
Buyers are trying to get homes for less, but guess what? They didn’t get the properties. On one of my listings I had three offers, one that backed out, one that was still kind of hanging in and was hoping the sellers would take less and then the third buyer just stepped up and said, we want it. This exact same scenario played out on another listing. That was four transactions I’ve been involved with in the last four weeks. And the buyers were like, yeah, we get it. Interest rates have gone up, but we want that house. And some buyers actually have gotten some nice adjustable loan products that mirrored loan prices of 2018, 2019. Everybody’s afraid of paying too much it is understandable. And sellers are afraid of taking too little, if you’re selling, make sure you have your number within a range.
If you’re set on a number, you may be disappointed. But if you’re a little bit flexible, you can probably still get pretty close. There are buyers wants a house. They don’t want to play games. They are actually kind of keeping blinders on a little bit on the news because if they subscribe to that, they will be with all those other buyers, those other four buyers that actually did not secure the house and put it under contract. Because they are were afraid, serious buyers do homework get good loan products and good lenders. Bottom line is it’s not all doom and gloom on either side. The buyers are getting it for a little bit less than list sellers are doing really well. And the market is still humming along. It’s actually really pretty busy.
Sellers are saying no. And buyers are having to decide if they want to move forward. And then, there’s plenty of other buyers who come right behind them and say we will take it. It’s not a discount bargain basement situation out in the real estate market what we’re starting to see is prices are still hanging on there. Pretty good. And part of that is that inventory really hasn’t bulked up as much as we thought, because you have sellers now that are like, well, I’m not going to get what I want. It’s not that easy. If you’re a buyer, you have to be serious. You have to understand what the seller wants, if you want their house. And if you’re a seller I encourage you to have a range of what you want and, and you’ll probably be just fine. And as always get all the disclosures up front, as you can possible to make sure that you do not lose more on your price.
We have buyers and sellers that are still just doing just fine. It’s still super busy out there. I expect it to stay this way for a while. And we also have interest rates that have come down and may come down even a little bit more because that last fed interest rate changed the way investors invest and that changes the interest rates. So another increase could actually decrease the mortgage rates even more. If you were thinking, “I missed it” I do not think so. As a seller, you might still have a fairly good chance in the next couple months, before winter which is not always the best time. I also did a survey of properties that sold near the beach. And it’s interesting that December was actually a fairly decent month to sell oceanfront beachfront and ocean view.
It’s a beautiful time of year. So don’t give up completely now. As a seller you’re doing just fine and you know, if you got to go, you got to go. So sometimes it just doesn’t matter if the market is going to meet you. Sometimes you just got to go and meet the market where it is, same as if you’re a buyer.