First of all, the calendar was perfectly set up for an extended holiday vacation and for everyone to not come back to work until this week. Mortgage rates are double what they were a year ago so nobody can afford a house, plus it’s been raining cats and dogs.
It would be natural to assume that the real estate market is ‘frozen’, and at best we will have a sluggish start.
Yet the early action between La Jolla and Carlsbad has been sizzling:
NSDCC Listings Marked Pending Since Jan. 1st:
What is impressive is how long these listings have been on the market – the median DOM is 55 days! Wouldn’t buyers lay off those for a few weeks to see where this is going?
Did the sellers dump on price?
Why would they dump on price with the selling season is right around the corner? Surely they would let it run at least 2-3 weeks into January before giving it away, wouldn’t they?
Three of the 21 pendings were refreshed (on the market previously) and two of them sold in 2022.
Sounds like sellers are expecting spring to be a race to the bottom. (Which is a smart assessment)
Might as well get out now with an easy sale vs chasing the market down with increasingly picky buyers where in the end you get the same price just a lot more headaches along the way.
A logical conclusion.
Not sure if sellers and their listing agents are thinking that clearly during the first week of the year.
The share of adults who were working or looking for jobs plummeted during the brutal recession and anemic recovery that followed the 2008 financial crisis. Many forecasters expected it to keep falling as the enormous baby boom generation moved toward retirement.
Many boomers put off retiring, however. In 2019, just before the pandemic, 57 percent of Americans in their early 60s were still working, compared with 46 percent of that age group two decades earlier. Improved health and shifting industry patterns — more jobs in offices, fewer in factories — played a role. So did sheer financial necessity: The housing bust and stock market collapse left many people without enough savings for retirement.
Instead of dropping, the share of workers and job seekers leveled off starting in about 2014, then began to rise slowly toward the end of the decade. That shift partly reflected the strengthening economic recovery, which drew workers off the sidelines as wages rose and opportunities improved. But the importance of the baby boomers is hard to overstate: Virtually all of the growth in the labor force between the end of the Great Recession and the start of the pandemic a decade later came from workers 55 and older.
The outsize importance of the boomers is the result of the generation’s size: Some 76 million Americans were born between 1946 and 1964. By comparison, just 47 million people were born into the so-called silent generation that preceded the boomers, and 55 million into Generation X. By working just a few years longer than anticipated, the boomers helped reshape the entire labor market for a decade.
The boomers were in their 50s and early 60s when the economy began to emerge from the Great Recession. Today, nearly all of them are in their 60s and 70s, and well over half are past the traditional retirement age of 65.
Some people plan to keep working into their 70s or beyond, but many do not. The huge increase in home prices and, until last year, the stock market left many with healthy retirement accounts. Others would like to keep working but can’t because of ill health or age discrimination.
The pandemic, which made in-person interactions particularly dangerous for older workers, accelerated their departure from the work force. Among Americans ages 55 to 64 — the oldest members of Generation X and the youngest boomers — the share of people who are working or seeking jobs has rebounded to its prepandemic level. But for those 65 and up, that rate remains depressed.
Other forces could still help counteract the retirement wave. Remote work could make it easier for people with disabilities, parents of young children and others to return to or find work. Increased immigration, if Congress were to allow it, could provide a new pool of potential workers. And the last economic recovery demonstrated the power of a strong job market to attract workers. But the economic tailwind that the boomers have generated for decades is now blowing in the other direction.