Why we have to pay attention to the numbers in this changing market.
We are talking today about interpreting the numbers in the real estate game. In July, I met one of my previous neighbors from three neighborhoods ago, and his wife had recently passed away. He needed to move out of state to be with family, and it was a pretty stressful time for him.
He was pretty clear about what houses had been offered at and accepted for in his neighborhood over the last year, so that’s where he wanted to start. We were pretty aware that the market had shifted, but we weren’t sure how much by then. There was one neighbor around the corner who had sold for $550,000. Another one across the street sold for $525,000 with an identical floor plan, and it was the same floor plan that I had lived in when I was in the neighborhood, so I knew exactly what we were looking at.
I told him we could go ahead and try the $550,000—that was really important to him, but it became apparent quickly that that number was not going to work in July’s market. In early August, we dropped the price, and after about another week, we realized we still weren’t there and dropped the price again from $550,000 to $530,000, and then $515,000. We got an offer and accepted it at $505,000.
That’s pretty much what’s happening in the market right now. If you are not priced correctly immediately, then it is requiring price drops, and most houses are accepting price drops from their offered price at the time the offer is accepted in order to sell. That’s just where we are. So it’s really on our side as the real estate broker to take a look at the information about what has sold, apply it to this one, and we can be very clear about, if not exactly what this home should be initially, we can see very quickly what is happening week over week and month over month in our market so that we know what’s happening in this cooling market to our home values.
“Real estate really is all about the numbers.”
One of our other sellers just recently had a buyer whose financing failed after they had been off the market for three weeks. In just that month from when we priced it, a week later put it on the market, and three weeks later lost that buyer, we had lost 4.8%. From $450,000, a very low price point, that still brought us down to $430,000—that was still $20,000.
What is my point here? It might not feel like a game to you, but it really is all about the numbers, and we do have data that we use to make sure that our sellers get what they need. I helped my first seller, that previous neighbor I started talking about, just yesterday get everything left into the POD so he could get locked up and out the door, and in the text he sent this morning, he said he didn’t have words for how grateful he was for how I helped him put all of this together. Did he get what he originally wanted? No. Did he get what he wanted next? Not really. Did he get what he ultimately needed and felt grateful for in the end? Absolutely.
So that’s what we do. I wish I could make the market. I wish everybody could be happy and get what they want, but that’s not my job. My job is to interpret and share with my sellers for great success. My question for you is, who do you know right now who needs to understand exactly what’s happening in this market so we can dial them up for success in that numbers game of real estate?
This isn’t just a game. It’s your real life, and it’s very important. We’re here to help. Stay safe, stay healthy, stay blessed, have a super day, and I’m excited to talk with you about how we can help in this cooling market to set you or those you care about up for success. Have a super day.
