Buyers Market and Record Numbers are Backing Out
 

Call it the year of cold feet. More than 15% of home purchase agreements fell through in July, the highest percentage for that particular month since the real estate firm Redfin began tracking cancellations in 2017

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/real...er/ar-AA1LLMHM

We are solidly in a buyer market. Some things to know if you wish to buy a home. Before contracting (where both sides sign a purchase agreement), consider any and all contingencies you want in the contract. There is an ample supply of homes and you can afford to be choosy.

To ensure a smooth home purchase, consider these key elements for a buyer's contingency clause:

Financing Contingency: Make the purchase dependent on securing a mortgage or financing approval.
Home Inspection Contingency: Allow for a professional inspection to identify any significant issues before finalizing the sale.
Appraisal Contingency: Ensure the home appraises at or above the purchase price to protect against overpaying.
Sale of Current Home Contingency: Include a clause that allows you to back out if your current home doesn’t sell by a certain date.
Title Contingency: Verify that the title is clear of liens or disputes before proceeding with the purchase.
Repair Contingency: Require the seller to address specific repairs identified during the inspection before closing.

Most of all enjoy your purchase, you worked hard for every dollar you have earned and deserve good value in today’s market.

Good post. I will add that if a buyer is paying cash and they know how to use Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin, etc. to dig into the specifics of comparable properties that have sold in the last 6 months - they don't need to spend the $$ on an appraisal.

I have found appraisers to be mediocre at determining value and some agents, the same, at determining appropriate pricing. It is not difficult to find-out both yourself with some adequate research and analysis. Save yourself $400 or $500.

Absolutely
 

Yes, and a buyer can put an address in the county database and do a search.
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On this site you can locate all the homes in a specific neighborhood map and the prices they sold for including the date sold. Be informed!

That post was a copy & paste from MSN, who took it from Business Insider's, James Rodriguez.

Business Insider & James Rodriquez, are about as credible as Geraldo Rivera. Fake News.

Very credible
 

Yes, that’s why I included the link for those two sentences. The article is one day old and the source for its author is Redfin. I really don’t ever see MLA format for citations on this forum, lol

Prices dropping and cancelled contracts all indicate the contraction of prices on homes. This coupled with inventory and the prolonged amount of days a typical listing has to be up for a sale indicate a buyers market of course.

More. Emailed to me today from Zillow.

IMO Can demand all you want but seller don’t have Agree or take offer, which could so of that percentage. Also Desperately wanting to get rid of property IMO usually when get property under valued. Good example neighbor died and kids wanted rid of property fast so they unvalued it 40K to sell quickly. Which it did in less than month. What does this do? decrease value of homes in that area.

Except the source has been misquoted.

Redfin can't possibly track "buyers getting cold feet", nor track buyer's motivation for cancelling contracts. All they can track is the number of housing units that are marked as "under contract" and how many of those close with the original offeror.

That doesn't mean a buyer got "cold feet". There are a zillion reasons why such things happen, particularly in a slower market, with high interest rates. Cancellations dropped in Tampa and Orlando.

Why not read the actual Redfin report, instead of posting one that's been slanted and re-hashed by a less than credible source?

Redfin Reports Home Purchases Are Getting Canceled at a Record Rate - Redfin Real Estate News

This was reported on Fox Business as well.

From a value assessment of my house, the value has decreased by 15% over the past year. The counties are in a panic mode and the assessors are inflating the value of homes in order to maintain the tax base.

That's not how assessments and real estate tax levy work.

Tax rate is derived from the total levy and is simple, 5th grade "division".

You hit the nail on the head!

Exactly! We have homes on our street and in our neighborhood that are already listed too low, and are dropping by 40 grand at the influence of their realtors.
The skuttlebutt from neighbors
mock them as being crazy for expecting to find a buyer "at that price."
Granted, it's a Buyers Market, but people are panicing and dropping the price, (instead of by $1000), by 35 and 40 grand, hurting our values, maybe for years to come.

2 weeks ago
 

We had a neighbor that had sold their home about a month ago. The buyer backed out last Friday. IMO it isn’t the time to sell a home.

Most of this is irrelevant because it is too general to apply to individual markets. For example, the last stats I saw from a TV flyer was new houses average 10 days on the market, resales <60 days, BUT THAT'S JUST HERE IN TV! Up north where I have another home (rural setting), the shortage is such that my house is now worth 3x what I paid for it 10 years ago and 5x what it cost to build 20 years ago. In my neighborhood up north, builder grade homes with minimal changes/upgrade sell for more than my new designer home here in TV. My neighbor up north in a rural area development sold their 20-year-old builder grade finishes home for $265/sq ft., which is more than my new home in TV. New homes in the same area up north are well over $300/sq ft. and are all sold about as fast as they hit the market. Bottomline, IMO, the only generalizations worth anything are local markets.

Very local
 

Very local, you can’t even group the Villages as a whole. South of the turnpike premium lots are a whole different market than Dabney. We got that market update from the builder, and understand they undercut most pre existing homes to sell new ones. But from what I hear, they have less upgrades too. They are just trying to get buyers.

We may be seeing the beginning of a deep recession.

or not

Jobs Market
 

The jobs report may be enough of a jab to get the Fed to at least do a.25 cut on the 18th, but inflation still isn’t under control. Even if we had a cut, I’m not sure our market would see any benefit from it.

There appears to be a normalization of housing prices. The average cost of housing over the past 30 years has increase around 4.5% but this is an average and includes some wild upwards and downwards swings. We are just exiting a wild upward swing that occurred during the COVID years where sellers were seeking and getting annual increases of 20-40%. Housing in the villages have a high turnover rate. Those who bought in the last 5 years likely paid inflated prices relative to the average and the seller in a buyer's market is always the last to accept the trend. I have seen homeowners on this site talk as though the 20% annual increase is a reasonable expectation. I have also recently seen sellers lower their asking price by over $200K as reality sets in. If you bought recently, you will probably have to wait a while until you can expect to sell it for more than you paid.

"Hurting values"?

Or just the market readjusting to some ridiculously high prices that were an anomaly in the first place?

Case in point: our home, if one went by the selling prices of similar homes in this and adjacent Villages, appreciated in value something like $130,000 in our first two months here. Good sales tactics and people in a virtual panic to get in here while the getting was good. But I didn't congratulate myself on making some kind of incredibly good deal because we got in under the wire before prices went berserk.

We've been in markets like that before, and if there is one thing we learned it is timing rather than value that is important. Knowing how to ride the roller coaster is what matters.

The Villages Isn’t Grouped As a Whole
 

I don’t know of any who group the real estate of the Villages of Florida as “ Villages as a whole”. The weekly video done by David segregates it best. There are four sections: The Northern Section or all homes north of 466 and south of 42. There are Between the 6’s, or the homes between 466 and 466 A. There is the section between 466A and 44. Finally, there is the South with all homes south of 44. Even Goldwingnut has adapted the terms in some of his videos and delivers distinctions between the areas.

We live south of 44 and I can tell you houses do sell, but mostly they sell as view lots or are underpriced compared to the rest of the market. The homes that are priced a 100 to 150 k over the price paid 3 years ago are sitting like crickets chirping in the night air.