What is up?
What is down?
And what that means to you?
- Listings are up, active inventory and price cuts.
- Rates and home prices, seem to remain the same… flat to high.
- Mortgage applications are down, yet up, compared to 2023.
There seems to be a lot going on in this “market.” Saddle up!
Per Housing Wire, “I am pleased that we’ve seen new listings data grow year over year — it’s a big step forward.” However, we are not seeing the growth we saw in 2021-2022, which makes 100% sense to me. For a “normal” market, this seems like a sustainable amount of growth.
Nationally, below are the number of listings for last week over the previous several years:
- 2024: 68,407
- 2023: 61,707
- 2022: 73,462
What we do need to look at is the active inventory and start having NEW and DIFFERENT conversations with buyers and sellers to prepare them for this market. What do I mean? I mean, a price cut strategy might be in order, at the TIME OF LISTING. Here is why:
In an average year, one-third of all homes take a price cut — this is standard housing activity. As rates have stayed elevated, the price-cut percentage is higher than in the last two years, and certain pockets of the U.S. have higher inventory than the national data. The one big difference in 2024 versus 2022 data is that in 2022, home sales were crashing all year long, and new listings were collapsing to all-time lows in the second half of the year. Now, home sales are just stuck at historic low levels — a big difference.
A few weeks ago, on the HousingWire Daily podcast, I discussed that the price-growth data will cool down in the year’s second half. Here are the price-cut percentages for last week over the previous few years:
- 2024: 39%
- 2023: 34%
- 2022: 36%
We could be in a position for a more balanced market and yet, preparing is always the BEST strategy.
My 2 cents, position yourself to GET listings and KEEP them.
3 Strategies to Keep Those Listings
- Price adjustment system
- Have a system in place at the listing presentation.
- Be specific, set dates to adjust, set dates to make the call
- Expect longer days on market
- i.e. “At day 30, we decrease by “x”; at day 60, and so on.
- OR call, and say, I know we talked about a price adjustment at day 30 but we had 4 showings, and we should hold for a few more days. I’ll call you Thursday, if I don’t have an update before.”
- Expired listing agreement
- Listings will expire, get your system in order
- Pick two dates a year, June 30th and December 31st.
- Decrease the likelihood of your expired listings being stolen.
- “Seller, I have to expired dates for listings each year, depending on when I take yours, yours will be “x”
- Put your past, unsuccessful buyers on speed-dial. See above.
- Sell your own listings
- Win/Win for both clients
And 3 Ways I can Help:
- Need the dialogue?
- Need the system?
- Need the resource?