Rockwall Homes

There is a key point of advice that most Real Estate Agents will tell you  – “If you overprice your home, it will take longer to sell and sell for less money.”

However, sellers refuse to listen, and overprice their homes anyway, hoping their home will be the one to defy market physics. Why do they do it? There are lots of reasons:

They feel like they have to make a profit

They don’t want to bring money to closing

They feel their home is better than other similar homes

They want a return on repairs they have made and improvements

They want to buy a more expensive, larger home

They want to be able to pay off loans and debts

They want to pay for some type of financial goal like retirement or college

They think buyers want to negotiate

They think real estate agents are capable of selling it if they put a lot of work in

Did you notice that not a single one of those reasons has anything to do with the current market value of the home?

An older study from Zillow.com stated, sellers often base their asking prices on their original purchase price. In other words, they want to live in the home for a number of years, and then sell it for more than they paid for it so they can meet personal financial goals, such as buying a bigger home or putting more toward retirement.

That’s understandable, considering that normally, homes beat inflation by one or two points, but the market doesn’t always cooperate. Buyers may not agree with the improvements you made to your home. Your home may have been trendy when you bought it, but now the trends might have changed and buyers are looking for something different.

If you overprice, your home is going to stagnate on the market. The buyer that is looking for your home wont even know it is there if your price isn’t in their searching price range. That means a typical search between $175,000 and $200,000 won’t include your home priced at $205,000.

Buyers tend to search in increments depending on scale – $10,000 increments for $100,000 homes and $100,000 increments for million-dollar homes. When you price your home just above the logical range it puts you out of the search of many buyers.

Some think that setting the price high so you can come down is a good strategy, however, that is incorrect. You might get some showings, but you won’t get offers. Your home could sit without an offer for a month or two before you take action to reduce the price. Once you come around to reducing the price buyers wonder why it has been on the market for so long thinking something is wrong. This leads to an even lower price.

Instead, price your home just under break points. $249,000 instead of $255,000. Since you’re already expecting to negotiate, a lower price point might get you a full-price offer from a buyer who recognizes that your home is a great buy.

To take advantage of near-record low mortgage interest rates and home prices undervalued by as near as three percent nationwide, now is a great time to buy a home.

You’ve already missed the bottom of the market, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t great buys out there. Your community may not have appreciated as quickly as some of the big metro areas have recently. Your boom may yet come.

To begin with, the economy is growing quickly. From information collected on or before August 22, 2014, the Federal Reserve’s “Beige Book” report found economic activity is up in all eight national districts, including consumer spending, freight loads for deliveries of goods, and more.

But there are even better reasons to buy a home right now. Here are just a few:

Availability of Jobs Has Increased

The Labor Department announced that the jobless rate is now below six percent. Consider how far the job market has come since January 2010 when unemployment was 9.7 percent.

Houses hedge against inflation

The Consumer Price for All Urban Consumers is up 1.7% from August 2013 to August 2014, not including volatile food and gas prices. The food index has risen 2.7 percent, while the energy index has increased 0.4 percent. This is the first month since 2010 that the index hasn’t risen.

You may ask why that might be good for homeowners, that is because even in a tepid inflationary environment when prices rise a major asset, such as a home, becomes more valuable when purchased at a fixed cause. Typically, in an inflationary environment, housing prices rise.

Housing price gains are slowing

The median existing-home price in August was $219,800, which is 4.8 percent higher than home prices in August 2013. This marks the 30th consecutive month of year-over-year price gains. In 2013, home prices had risen to double digits.

Mortgage interest rates are still low

According to Freddie Mac’s archives the lowest that mortgage interest rates have been in modern history, since 1971, was in November and December of 2012. It was set at 3.35 percent, with 0.7 points for a benchmark 30-year fixed-rate loan. The most recent Freddie Mac survey found national averages at 4.16 percent with .05 percent points in September 2014.

Pent-up demand ready to release

Household formation has been silenced since the Great Recession preventing as many as 2.5 million people from forming households who otherwise would have. Economists with Harvard’s Center for Joint Housing Studies predict that annual U.S. housing starts should average 1.4 to 1.5 million over the coming decade. Considering that the largest generation ever, 81 million Echo Boomers, are well into the renting and homebuying age. The numbers should be closer to the 2.3 percent annual growth of the 1970’s when 78 million Baby Boomers reached adulthood.

Buy VS rent ratios favor homeownership

Trulia, a real estate marketplace and research group announced that nationally, rents rose 6.5% year-over-year in September 2014. Apartment rents were up 6.9%, while single-family home rents gained 5.2%. At the same time, housing prices have leveled off.

The takeaway

A housing market never remains even. There are always surges and dips. Buyers could wait for better market conditions, but the present alignment of low mortgage interest rates, slowing home prices, rising rents, and pent-up demands add up to great reasons as to why you should buy a home right now.