Weekly Wrap Up...27 Offers Later and 150k Over Asking!🤯

HEY SUDBURY!

Hope you guys are feeling as stuffed as I am after a full weekend of Turkey and family last week.  We are back in the routine with the family this week, all 3 boys are in hockey and keeping us super busy at the rink. After a long hiatus from the rink I put the old goalie skates on to help with my youngest Benjamin this last week.  We spent the entire hour working on trying to have 3 year old kids get up on their skates by them selves, and we were somewhat successful.  By the end of the hour there were fewer tears and I think I may have even seen a smile.  This is one of the best feelings about being in a smaller community when the friends and neighbours all come out with their kids at the local rink, it brings back a familiar feeling, one that we missed out on last year.  

On the real estate front we saw an uptick in listings and a slow down in sales for the first time in a long while.  I was predicting for the last few weeks that sales would spike as the winter market is around the corner but we weren’t seeing it play out in the stats as we had initially predicted...

My 5 takeaways this week are:

📉We have been dropping in total listing for the last 9 weeks, well that took a slight reversal this week, which was propelled by more listings than sales. I kept on talking about how we were going to see this peak in activity with listings before we entered the winter market. The numbers were lagging behind more than I was expecting, until this week.  I do believe that this bump is tied to the last push before the winter market. A bump of activity I’ve been expecting but didn’t see for the last few weeks. 

⬇️We had a drop of conditional deals last week that I can’t really explain.  It was the first time since February we were down in the single digits.  With this weeks doubling in pending deals we are back to normal market activity.  Just a reminder that conditional/pending deals is a snapshot of how active the market is at any given time (with accepted offers that are pending inspections/financing, etc…) 

💲We have chatted in the past about underpriced listings, and this week it struck again.  We are fully in a marketplace where if your shopping for a home under 300k you can expect that its going to need significant work, and yet agents will still list homes that are pretty decent at 230k.  This place in the valley on a big lot got just a bit of action on the offer date the number of interested buyers kept stacking up.  In the end the final tally was 27 offers and the little bungalow that the listing agent priced at 230k sold almost 150k over asking price!  The biggest take away from this is that there were 26 other buyers who were ready to compete that didn’t get the house.  This is the stat that we haven’t been tracking that I want to make a better effort within the team to keep a pulse on.  What type of home/price point is getting the highest number of offers, as its the homes that are getting the fewest that may be good opportunities to be looking for.  This is the strategy of zagging in the market when everyone else is zigging.  

🖥️ Facebook can be a mean mean place… Especially from the peanut gallery who loves to troll our advertisements. We take so much pride in getting the most exposure for all of our clients, and that includes a fully encompassed online strategy with targeted Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads and we are starting to dabble into youtube as well.  This week we are advertising a stunningly beautiful modular home, a great southend location but the price point wasn’t cheap at 200k.  Well the peanut gallery went full force on this one, there is so many people set up in their basements as keyboard warriors who love shaming and bashing on the housing market.  I really make a point to not delete comments (even the negative ones) for a few reasons, I don’t think there is anything wrong with an open an honest conversation as well as I don’t want to be seen as not being transparent.  The last reasons I don’t delete is facebook doesn’t look at ‘engagement’ as positive or negative, if people are engaging with your ad they see that only as a positive and will hack the algorithm to have our ad in front of more eye balls.  The ad this weekend was especially difficult to keep on top of, and I may reflect on changing my strategy on this, so I would love to hear your feedback.  And ultimately we know its not the true buyers who are commenting with the negative posts, as we had an amazing offer within 24 hours of listing the place! But its people frustrated that rents and prices continue to increase as they are sitting on the sidelines looking from the outside in. 

🤷‍♂️Where does the market go from here… The numbers this week are the numbers I have been expecting for awhile, specifically with the increase in listings.  We are seeing the last push of sellers who are trying to be out before Christmas. As we move a few weeks into he future we are going to see a few things play out.  I think we will see the ‘window shopper’ buyers take a step back and wait for the spring market.  We will also see the flip type houses become more sought after with contractors look to secure winter projects for their crews to keep them busy over the winter months. And we will see fewer sellers putting their house on the market (unless they are extra-motivated with relocations or change in family situations).  The reality of what’s been happening with the decrease in listings over the last 5 years is that as houses get more and more expensive, we're seeing for the first time that sellers can’t afford to buy their own homes.  Which means they aren’t interested in getting in the market to look for a ‘downsize house’ or a different type or property.  As we find this scenario play out more and more, I fully predict that we will see this trend continue as I honestly think we will see house prices continue to rise over the next 12-18 months.  We will fully be at a place where a lot of sellers wouldn’t buy their own homes for the values that the market will pay.  

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