Hot Pockets. Yep, I’m about to use them to explain the housing market. That either makes me deeply creative or really immature. I’ll let you decide. On a serious note though, let’s talk about this analogy and consider the importance of giving value adjustments to comps during an increasing market. As always, I’d love to hear your take in the comments below.

Hot Pockets analogy: The real estate market is like a Hot Pocket taken out of the microwave a tad too early. Some portions are blazing hot while others are only warm or frozen. Like a Hot Pocket, we can say the real estate market is “hot” overall, but it’s definitely not the same temperature in every neighborhood or price range.

Thoughts on making adjustments in an increasing market:

1. Changing Market: If the market has changed since the most recent sales got into contract, a value adjustment may be needed. In other words, if the market is now higher or lower than the sales, we can account for that in an appraisal (or listing) by making an up or down value adjustment to the comps. Of course there needs to be support for making such an adjustment. We can’t just say, “There’s no inventory, so value must be higher”. We need to rather find support in the market (see #2 and #3).
2. Pendings vs. Sales: There are many signs of an increasing market, but one of the best things to do is compare competitive pendings and sales. Are pendings getting into contract at higher levels? The other day I appraised something where pendings were about 3-4% higher than similar sales from December, so I ended up giving a 3-4% upward adjustment to a couple of sales I used from November and December. I didn’t have many recent sales to work with unfortunately, but comparing a few older sales with a few current pendings helped me see the current market. Remember, the entire county might show certain trends, but we have to look in each neighborhood to find neighborhood trends (which could be different).
3. Contract Date: When making adjustments we need to look at when the comps got into contract. One comp may have a contract date four months old, while another is from 40 days ago. The change in the market could easily be different for each comp, which means it’s okay to give big adjustments to some comps and smaller ones to others (or no adjustment).
4. The Real Price: In an increasing market it’s very helpful for appraisers (and agents) to know the exact price of pending “comps” where possible. After all, we might see something listed as “pending” in MLS, but the real contract price could be higher or lower. On one hand appraisers might give less weight to pendings because we don’t know the precise dollar amount in many cases, though when agents divulge the exact contract price and terms, it can help appraisers give even stronger weight to pendings in the neighborhood.
5. Imperfect Data: It would be nice if all neighborhood data was perfectly aligned, but sometimes it’s conflicting, which means we have to use good judgement. Does that one high sale or pending really reflect the market or not? Is it reasonable? Do those two lower pendings mean the market is starting to soften? Did the hefty credit to the buyer in that one comp inflate the sales price? At the end of the day we have to spend time weighing both sales and listings to see the market, which means sometimes we end up throwing out certain sales because they’re outliers more than anything.

I hope that was helpful.

Questions: When was the last time you ate a Hot Pocket? Anything else you’d add to this post? I’d love to hear your take

If you liked this post, subscribe by email (or RSS). Thanks for being here.