The changing market and how real estate agents and sellers are scrambling to adjust on the fly

Continuing the conversation…talking about the changing market and how real estate agents and sellers are scrambling to adjust on the fly.

As the evidence mounts (more listings, more price reductions, fewer overall sales) it’s starting to feel like less of a seasonal lull and more like a larger shift in the balance between buyers and sellers. If that’s true, it’s a shift that’s at least a year overdue. This has been the longest uninterrupted seller’s market anyone can remember. A wild ride. But no cycle, up or down, lasts forever.

Which is an easy thing to say in the abstract. But a much harder thing to accept when it’s your house that’s in the middle of a changing market! To help inform some of the difficult discussions ahead, as agents, sellers and buyers struggle to tweak their perspectives, here are a few more observations about how the market communicates its message. Whether it’s the one you want to hear or not.

If you are selling your house…the goal is to sell your house. It doesn’t matter what you think your house is worth. Or what your agent thinks it’s worth. Or what anyone else thinks along the way. The market simply doesn’t care. The only thing that matters is what all those ready, willing and able buyers think your house is worth.

The market can be defined as: how every house compares to every other house that’s for sale, and by how many buyers are competing with each other at any given point in time, aka the law of supply and demand.

“People vote with their pocketbooks.” Everyone has heard the phrase. Nowhere is that more true than in real estate. When some places sell and others don’t, it’s the perfect illustration of people voting with their pocketbooks. They compare, contrast and exercise their right to choose from all the available options.

The most fundamental truth about any mar- ketplace is this: at the right price, everything sells. Friends, neighbors, relatives and/or your own inner voices driven by fear and expectation can spin the market’s message in a confusing variety of ways. There’s never a lack of excuses about why a house isn’t selling.

But in the end, it all comes back to the same thing. At the right price, it doesn’t matter if there’s too much freeway noise, too much work, too many trees, too small of a yard,
(or too big of a yard!), too many steps, too few bedrooms, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. Because…at the right price, all of those objec- tions will disappear and your house will sell.