Quarantine. Wearing masks. Social distancing. It’s so weird that these are regular things now. The world indeed has changed over the past month and so has the housing market. Let’s talk about some new developments.

FIVE WEEKS AGO: About five weeks ago the real estate market started to have a strong reaction to the coronavirus. I look to March 12th as our day of change as that’s when things started to kick into high gear with events cancelling and sellers and buyers backing off the market.

OBSERVATIONS RIGHT NOW:

1) Pendings and listings declined heavily for a few weeks.
2) Pending contracts have begun to increase again.
3) More new listings are hitting the market.

Here’s a closer look at the numbers. These are single family detached homes without condos. I don’t include condos because they’re a different market that can water down the data. If you include them in your numbers, that’s cool.

Here is a look at new listings. There has not been a dramatic uptick, but we are seeing more new listings compared to a month ago (the first week we had sheltering in place). 

SOME CLOSING THOUGHTS:

1) Goodbye cliches, hello experts: In a market like today it forces us to place our cliches, canned statements, predictions, and positive or doomy narratives aside. We simply must look to the numbers to understand the market. When trends change it creates opportunities for experts to arise. It also creates opportunity for credibility to be destroyed by making predictions that don’t come true and getting swept up in every single sensational headline.

2) Other markets too: This dynamic of the market seeming to hit a bottom a few weeks ago is something that is happening in some other areas across the country too as reported by Mike DelPrete in his email yesterday (a must follow). I’ll talk about this more in my weekly video at the end of this week. Please know I’m not saying prices or other metrics have bottomed out. I’m only saying it looks like listings and pendings (for now) have begun to increase again.

3) The future: We still don’t know the future, so I’d exercise caution in saying definitively the market has begun a recovery or rebound and will move forward from this point onward. We need time to see how everything shakes out and we’re still living in the midst of so many unknown factors that could sway the market in many ways. The reality is what we say about the market could be different next week based on new data.

4) Getting used to the pandemic: For now it looks like buyers and sellers have started to get a little more used to this pandemic market, which is evidenced by more pending contracts and an increase of listings lately. It’s possible some of this could be attributed to real estate agents being deemed essential too. Will this continue? Is this a trend we’ll see more in coming weeks? To be determined. 

GRAPHS: I plan to make a tutorial soon on how to make a few of the graphs I’ve been posting. Appraiser colleagues, I haven’t forgotten.

I hope this was helpful.

Okay, moving on:

RESOURCES:

Interview with The Appraiser Coach: I did an interview with Dustin Harris to talk about not waiting for sales to see pandemic data. Watch below (or here).

Interview with Brad: I did a Facebook Live Q&A with Brad L’Engle last week to talk shop. Enjoy here if you wish (you don’t need Facebook to watch). 

I hope this was interesting or helpful. Thanks for being here.

Questions: What do you make of the stats above? What are you hearing in escrows from buyers and sellers? If you’re not local, what are you seeing happen in your market?

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