Hope you enjoyed the "spring market".
It showed up early, hit hard and is now headed for the door.
We see a pattern similar to this most years. The year begins with very low inventory while buyers show up in larger numbers. That creates an imbalance between supply and demand which often results in multiple offers and bidding wars until more inventory shows up, which invariably happens as you get closer to graduation season and the end of the school year.
With inflation persisting (due in large part because of never-ending government deficit spending) and rates now firmly into the mid 7's, the buyer pool is being thinned even further while inventory will continue climbing.
It's hard for me to see how prices hold up in the second half of the year with rates north of 7.5%.
By understanding the dynamics of this market and educating my clients well, I've listed five homes this year and all five ended up with multiple offers... 17, 5, 4, 4 and 3... to be exact. Those homes sold $50k over list, $40k over list, $31k over list, $10k over list and $7k over list.
If you detect a trend here, it's because we understand that pricing a home attractively drives activity, which drives showings, which drives offers, which drives up the final price.
You must have showings to be successful, and to have showings, your listing must stand out.
I've told my sellers repeatedly this year, there are two types of homes on the market - those that will sell in 7 days or less (often with multiple offers)... and those that won't sell at all.
Market wide showing statistics in April bear this out.
Over the past 30 days, all new listings in the Denver MLS averaged 7.85 showings in the first seven days on the market, according to data from RE Colorado.
But for properties that went pending in the first seven days on the market, those listings averaged 16.30 showings.
What you see here is, if you are a seller, the first seven days are absolutely critical to your success. The homes that are going under contract are averaging twice as many showings as those new listings not going under contract... which means those prospective buyers are showing up for a reason.
And what drives showings is pricing, condition and marketing.
You've got to price your home realistically - no more pie in the sky nonsense.
Your home has to pop - it needs to be clean, uncluttered and at least relatively updated.
And you need to display a serious commitment to marketing and promotion - which means staging, professional photography, aerial images, walkthrough video tours and extensive pre-market awareness campaigns.
If you can do that, there are definitely buyers, and those buyers will often compete (and compete hard) for your listing.
If you follow the non-descript "4P" approach to selling a home... put a sign in the yard, put it in the MLS, put a lockbox on the door and pray for a buyer... good luck to you.
Once we get past Memorial Day, and barring some unforeseeable plunge in interest rates, I predict we're going to see the slowest real estate market we've seen in at least a decade during the second half of 2024. And it will be made worse by the new buyer agency rules coming in July, when buyers will be required to take more direct responsibility for compensating their agents due to the NAR settlements.
If you are thinking of putting a home on the market and you don't have an iron clad commitment to getting your home sold, it's likely to be a long, hard slog through a slow, hot summer with fewer buyers, fewer showings and at least some degree of price damage until interest rates come down, if they do at all.
The buyer pool is fragile right now, and sellers (most with huge amounts of equity) have far more motivation to sell than buyers do to buy. That only changes when interest rates come down, which only happens when inflation comes down, which only happens when the government shows some fiscal restraint.
Which hasn't happened since the printing presses were fired up in the 2020 Covid pandemic, and certainly won't be happening in a contentious election year.
