Busy!

It must be the daffodils pushing up through the ground in the city, heralding the arrival of spring. Over the past two weeks, I've been crazy busy with city folks shopping for a country getaway. I've been booked back to back with appointments for the past two weekends. My colleagues and I at CBA have written 5 offers over the past week, and I expect we'll come to terms on most of them. Searches on the multiple listing search on my website have been steadily rising all month. with about 450 searches a day and 5,000 views of individual properties. Over the past ten days, anywhere from 4 to 8 people a day have been signing up for search accounts (which enables them to save properties or set up customized property searches.) To put that in perspective, ths historical average sign up rate is 2.1 per day. I've also been getting 8 to 12 email or phone inquiries a day about properties here.

Sellers may read this post and conclude that the market is roaring back, and so it's time to hold firm on price, or even raise their asking prices. Not so fast, cowboy. The buyers I'm interacting with are still very price focussed. Almost every inquiry about a specific property is about one that is at the low end of a property category. For example, while I've fielded a few dozen inquiries about lakefront homes over the past couple of weeks, not one has been for a lakefront property with an asking price above $400,000, and most have been for lakefront cottages with asking prices under $300,000.

It's certainly good news that the indicators of buyer interest seem to be trending up. Now the challenge is to have the right inventory at the right price to entice shoppers to become buyers.

Comments

[Bix]

I'd say sellers still have a needle in their arm too much of the time. There's a FSBO near me, nice place on a quiet cul de sac with some trout stream footage but no privacy -- other houses right on top of it. 2.3 acres, 3000 square foot.

Just picked up the brochure outside the house. Asking price: $499,000 "negotiable"! I'll bet. I've seen the same sign there for two years. I mean, come on! Do these people think buyers are total idiots? You could get a house on a lake for less than that. It doesn't help their credibility that they say that New York is 1 1/2 hours away, when anyone driving in from the city knows that's off by at least one hour.

[Catskill Farms]

DK - the interest in our homes - always somewhat heavy - has quadrupled in March, for whatever that is worth and April is scheduled to be more of the same. I'm actually seeing most action in the $400k-$500k range.