Rates crossed 7 percent this month, seller concessions hit their highest point in years, and every headline is asking whether the buyer’s market has arrived. The honest answer is that it depends on where you work.
It also depends on who you ask, because half the industry has never seen one. The National Association of Realtors’ most recent member profile puts the typical Realtor at 13 years in the business, so half of us got licensed in 2013 or later, after the last real buyer’s market had already ended.
The textbook says six months of inventory. Most local markets will not touch that anytime soon, and if that is what you are waiting for, you will be the last one to adjust. Your version will look different and quieter.
Is it a buyer’s market? 5 ways to tell, and what to do when it is
1. Watch the contracts, not the headlines
We cover four or five regional markets across the Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland area, and the picture is not uniform. Some areas are still under 30 days on market, and some homes go the first weekend. Plenty of others are averaging in the mid-30s. A few years ago our average sat in the low teens, so we are almost double that.
But days on market is the slow signal. The faster ones are sitting in your contracts right now. Fewer multiple offers, nothing escalating above list price and most contingencies back in. You do not need a report to notice any of that. If that is what your last few deals looked like, your market has turned, whatever the inventory number says.
2. Stop dropping the price at Day 20
Here is the part that gets me. The averages say it takes 30-plus days to go under contract, and I am still watching agents recommend price drops well before that.
When one comes to me, my first question is whether they are getting showings. They almost always say yes and then ask about dropping the price anyway.
Showings are information. Pulling feedback out of other agents is painful, and you may never hear anyone say the price is right. But if buyers are booking time to walk through, the home is showing well online, and the price is not scaring them off. Give it the time your own market data says it needs.
3. Ask for the things you have never been allowed to ask for
If you got licensed in the past decade, you have spent your whole career stripping things out of offers to win. That is over, and a lot of agents have not caught up.
We used to write enormous earnest money deposits just to get a seller to pick us. Your buyer can put down a smaller deposit now.
We used to give buyers a day or two to get that deposit in. You have more room than that, and in many cases, your buyer can get all the way through a home inspection before the deposit is even due, so they know what they are buying before their money is at risk.
If a home has been sitting, ask for concessions to buy down the rate. The worst answer is no.
4. Have the Day 30 conversation at the listing appointment
The price drop fight at Week Three happens because nobody set expectations in Week One.
Walk your seller through the whole first month while you are still sitting at their table: the coming-soon period, the go-live date, when the postcards hit the neighborhood, what you are doing for open houses. Then be straight with them. You want to sell this for the terms they want, the average days on market here is whatever it is, and here is what the comps in their CMA look like.
Then show them what happens if it goes past 30 days. Reverse prospecting through the MLS will tell you which agents have looked at the property, and those are calls you can make. A seller who knows that is coming does not panic at Day 25, and neither do you.
5. Use your peers
Somewhere along the way, thanks mostly to reality television, broker’s opens turned into productions. Catered spreads, exotic cars in the driveway, a food truck out front. That was apparently what it took to get your own peers to show up.
They are getting well attended again without any of it. The last one I went to was for a home that had been on the market almost 45 days. More than 20 agents walked through it, and there was no gimmick attached. They came because they know they will have a listing that needs honest feedback soon enough, and this is how that works.
You cannot get that from a portal, and you are not going to get it from the seller.
It’s all the same move
Read that list back, and every item on it is the same move. The frenzy rewarded speed. Strip the offer, win it, move on. Nobody had to be patient, because patience cost you the deal.
None of that works at 35 days. What works now is slower and a lot less exciting. Read your own contracts instead of the headlines. Let the showings tell you what the feedback never will. Say the hard part at the listing appointment instead of Week 3.
Half of us never had to learn any of it. We do now, and the agents who pick it up before their own numbers get scary are the ones whose sellers will stay calm, because they will be, too.
