May 15, 2010
Buying A Home – Know When To Buy Your Home
If you want to be sure you’re not overpaying on a property, you’ll need to find out if you’re dealing with a hot, cold, or uniformly balanced market. As you check out open houses, pay attention to whether there are crowds of home buyers checking out the house or if it’s quiet like a mouse with only the real estate agent present? You can tell the condition of the local market by calling your friends who are currently shopping for a home and see if they’ve had a tough time trying to be the first to submit an offer, or if it’s been relatively easy to discuss the deal with sellers. These occurrences are some of the few ways to determine the temperature of the local real estate market.
When the market is hot, you’ll discover an abundance of buyers versus sellers, with a minimum supply of houses to placate buyer demands. The instant a home is listed on the market, it’s sold virtually instantly with many sellers being stubborn to negotiate their sales price and other terms. You’ll find that when the home market is super hot, sellers may even start a bidding contest, with the home going to the buyer with the top price, fastest closing, and smoothest transaction.
When the housing market moves down, there are fewer buyers than sellers, and homes can linger on the market for several months before they’re sold. If you have a situation where the depressed economy accompanies a cold market, you may witness a rush of foreclosures hitting the real estate market. In this scenario, you can find some pretty good deals since sellers will be frenzied to dispose of the house since it has been languishing on the market for several months.
The best method to make a deal with a prospective seller will be contingent on whether the real estate market is hot, cold, changing, or somewhere in the middle. While a beginner can probably learn how to determine whether the local market is hot or cold, trying to determine if it’s going to transition up or down within the next few weeks is more challenging. Your local real estate market can be altered by the local and national economy, home costs and assess ability, supply and demand, lending interest rates, and more.
Once you start checking out home listings, you’ll start to become in tune with the local market. If you can reliably guess the asking price of newly listed homes, you’ll know the local market is pretty stable.
But when you begin to see an increase in open houses or price reduced signs starting to show up everywhere, you’ll know the home market is starting to cool down or plateau. An indispensable person to have on your home buying team is your local Realtor. He or she has quick access to the local multiple listing service and can tell you how long a home has been on the market and how many homes are for sale.
If you keep running into situations where other home buyers are consistently outbidding you and home prices are rising, that’s a sign the market is heating up and getting ready to take off, so you’ll need to move fast.
Want to find out more about Villa Park real estate? Then check out these local Villa Park Realtors to find one.
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