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Home sales cooling as buyers find ways to negotiate
FOX 26 Business Reporter Tom Zizka explains what home buyers are doing as home sales are slowing down.
HOUSTON - The pace of home sales continues to slow as some analysts suggest the market is in recession, and a new survey shows buyers are finding friendlier terms.
The Houston Association of Realtors says the number of July home sales fell more than 17% over last year. While prices still remain inflated, the frenzy over every new listing has cooled considerably.
Jeremy Paquette has seen it first hand. He moved his family from Houston to Colorado over the summer while he waited to sell his westside home. "I figured, you know, somewhere in 35 to 40 days, there'd be a closing."
Instead of the quick sale that he expected, the listing sat for weeks before finally getting an offer after trimming the asking price.
"The looking was fast and furious. The offers: The first offer took a month to six weeks," he says.
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West Houston realtor Chris Hiller says a degree of sanity has returned to a frantic period of selling and buying.
"I'd put the Fourth of July, almost as the day in my personal business, that the ship sailed," he says.
As rising interest rates make borrowing more expensive, and overly-aggressive pricing has backed-off a bit, to lure back buyers who had become frustrated with the process, Hiller says the deal-making is evolving.
"Realtors are having to brush off a whole set of skills that they haven't had to use for a couple of years now: Good pricing, and really taking a look at what's going to cause an offer to come in now in this changing market."
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A new Realtor.com survey suggests that's true, finding 92% of recent sellers accepted buyer-friendly terms, including dropping prices, making repairs, and even paying for the buyer's closing costs.
For sellers like Jeremy Paquette, it was just a relief to find a buyer and have the house in contract.
I was more interested in making the house 'go away, just so it's not something I'm having to deal with from a thousand miles away," he says.
Hiller maintains that a ‘seller’s market' continues in that quality homes will still find buyers. The difference, he says, is that those deals will take weeks, rather than days.