March 2019 RSS Feed

Many buyers are sitting on the fence waiting for interest rates to fall, but don’t know when to cash in their chips.

Gambling on Rates: Interest rates have fallen to 4.25%, the lowest level in over a year.

No matter what your age, or what kind of music you like, everybody has listened to and knows the lyrics to Kenny Roger’s “The Gambler.” “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em. Know when to fold ‘em. Know when to walk away. And know when to run.” It is a song about a young man who stumbles upon gambling advice from a seasoned, old, veteran gambler “on a train bound for nowhere.”

So many potential buyers are just like the young gambler, they simply don’t know when they should walk away from the fence they are sitting on and cash in their…

Not only have the clocks changed, so has the housing market.

The Spring Market: The best conditions to sell a home are right now.

It is that time of the year again. The hills are a dazzling green. Trees are beginning to bud new leaves. Flowers are opening their petals for the first time. Hummingbirds are feeding on the sweet nectar from birds-of-paradise. The season is changing and so is the housing market.

Housing has been accelerating all year and is officially moving at full speed. It took a while to ramp up, starting the year with an Expected Market Time of 140 days, a slight Buyer’s Market. [The Expected Market Time is the amount of time it would take for a home that comes on the market today to open up escrow down the road]. The market…

Ever since the Great Recession, far fewer homeowners have been selling their homes annually, a trend that is not going away.

Homeowners across the nation watched the housing market take a pounding during the Great Recession as their equity vanished in a blink. Many lost their homes to short sales or foreclosures. Everybody either personally got stung by the correction or knew of somebody who did. As a result, a new trend emerged to avoid a lobster red burn in the future: homeowners stay in their homes a lot longer. There are far fewer homeowners who opt to sell every year. Even with record home values, the trend continues.

The lack of supply and years of red-hot demand, juiced by historically low interest rates, has resulted in homes…