THIS INSANE HOUSING MARKET TREND MUST STOP! - Portland, OR & surrounding cities! 🏡😳🤦♀️
It's been said countless times that buying a home is one of the most stressful things you can do. Being a first-time home buyer is terrifying; any homeowner will tell you that. But it doesn't get any easier the more you do it. It's an enormous purchase, with many moving parts and tons of paperwork. Homeownership is a monumental moment in anyone's life. So imagine having all of that weight and now add that you need to make this life-altering decision in two minutes and have the perfect offer assembled within hours and guess at how much to offer because the list price is irrelevant and the comps show activity from a week ago, and that's not keeping up with right now and what about inspections AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!
Ultimately we're driving ourselves crazy. A seller doesn't need 20 offers, and a buyer shouldn't have to work so hard to get an offer accepted on a home.
Some of this chaos was created by outside influences: (1) Unscrupulous lending overheating the market from 2002 to 2006. (2) Lowering interest rates to stimulate the Housing Market after the crash in 2008. (3) Lowering interest rates to stimulate the market during the Covid 19 pandemic from 2019 to 2021. The increased purchasing power created by these actions is a massive factor in our demand-driven Housing Market. Add in the systemic underbuilding of housing for many decades, and we've created the perfect Housing Market monster. It's been a seller's market for the last 22 years, minus the years from 2008 to 2011 for the crash. That's not normal. And it's not that I wish for a hardcore buyer's market. I'm craving a balanced Housing Market.
Some of this chaos was created by us: home buyers, home sellers, and, yes, real estate agents. We toss ourselves into the tumble dryer of bidding wars when we follow the herd instead of our personal needs and wants. As a real estate agent, one of my least favorite questions is, "Is there a time of the year that's best for me to put my house on the market?" The responsible answer is to say whenever you need to sell your home is the best time to put it on the market. Unfortunately, I'm also painfully honest and a prominent trends geek, which means that I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't also mention that real estate activity is highest from February to July. So everyone wants to wait until those magical six months. Basically, we've created a Housing Market where we've shoehorned most of the activity into six months of the year. A year is 12 months, and we should use every month of the year, not just the six in the middle. As mentioned above, we've got enough outside factors working against us. Perhaps if we spread out the Housing Supply and Demand, we wouldn't constantly be operating in such a fast-moving, highly chaotic market.