Home Shoppers Taking Their Time
Prospective home buyers have been taking their sweet time looking for potential homes, townhouses, condos and the like to be their next dwelling of choice. And who can blame them?
Aside from the occasional story of the house that everyone wants that sells within a matter of days (yes there are still cases like that, some homes are just that desirable, so they go very quickly, especially to people with children if they’re in a good school district), there are more stories about buyers who have been shopping for their new home on and off for months now, just waiting for that perfect dream house to be found at the right price.
Likewise, there are a lot of homes and apartments and condos that would have been snatched up very quickly due to desirable amenities, space, and property, that are sitting on the market for months, even a year sometimes, and they’re not even priced badly, it’s just that there are a lot more homes on the market now than there are serious potential buyers. It’s what you call a buyer’s market.
I watch the show “My House is Worth What” all the time on HGTV. It’s one of my favorite shows, I have to admit, so I record it all the time and will watch it with my lunch or dinner on the weekends. I like to watch it just to see the homes and get great decorating ideas, not so much to figure out what I need to do to my house to get it to go up in value, but the added bonus is that I’ve learned a lot about the housing market, and what you should vs. what you shouldn’t do to your home in order for it to sell for maximum value and with the greatest ease whenever you do put it up for sale again.
Not that I plan on selling any time soon. When we bought this house, it was a long term investment, a home that we wanted to stay in and fix up regardless of resale value, so with that in mind I don’t pay much attention to all the tips about resale value because I’m content to stay here a while. However, I notice that within the past six months, the hosts of the show and the real estate experts that come in to appraise the home’s value and estimated listing price are very cautious to tell the sellers about how bad the market is, so they won’t be totally disappointed in the price.
There are also a lot more disappointed home owners I notice now that are being told their homes will list for a significant percentage less than what they had hoped for, and this is a show that used to tell people their properties were worth a whole lot more, so it’s a sign of the times when you start to see a lot more disappointed faces. They are also cautioned that it takes a lot more wow factor these days to move a home quickly.
