Are you thinking about buying or selling in 2024?
Are you thinking about buying or selling in 2024. Maybe you want to know how that might affect your sale or your purchase. I work primarily in Santa Cruz County, but the election does affect everywhere in the US, and I have been doing this for a long time and I’ve gotten better about warning buyers and sellers of upcoming events. And some of them are just minor occurrences that can change the market like holidays.
Elections do slow down the market because people pause. It’s not that they don’t want to buy a house or they don’t want to sell a house. It doesn’t take everything off the table. It is an attention shift to the election and the news cycle and everything that’s going on there, and everything just kind of stops. It is not a scenario where you wrote an offer on November 3rd, and everybody was voting on the 5th, and you wouldn’t get an answer until November 10th. It’s not like that. Yet, things tend to slow down.
What I recommend is if you’re going to go on the market, go on the market in September, early October, because our typical sales cycle right now is about 22 to 25 days in terms of list to sell. And that’s cutting across all types of listings, good, bad or other. And then if you’re going to purchase, just note that if you’re not seeing anything that you think is going to work for you, it may be closer to the election and sellers are not listing.
Here is the warning, buyers. Prices tend to go up. After the election and an administration is decided upon, you will see real estate change, based on that. You may see more sellers put their house on the market because they’re feeling more certain, and they’re going to go ahead and sell and move. Industry insiders that I follow say that after the election, prices will go up. Because we know who is going to be in office and people will feel more secure in making their changes to their home or their situation. And more buyers will enter the market, creating demand.
It doesn’t matter what administration is elected it is more about it being decided. Sales typically slow down a little bit in November and December but may jump up after this election. But you may see a few listings that come on that a seller had decided to sell in August but decided to wait until after the election to put their house on the market. They don’t care if it’s Christmas time, they are ready to go.
Sellers get a little bit more motivated when the market is slow, and as the days click up on the market. Some sellers may be adamant about price and, take their home off until next year. The takeaway is that home prices do tend to rise after an election. And I have seen that, again, it’s back to the certainty quotient of that. I’m not saying it depends on who gets elected, I’m just saying that once something is decided, people feel more confidant about the decisions that they’re going to make and don’t feel as less unsettled about what’s happening in the current political environment.
If you’re a buyer this might be the time to jump in. You might see some motivation on a seller’s part that would help you negotiate the price that you’re more comfortable paying on a house. If you have any more questions about this, give me a call or email.