The graph above is boring this time of year, so I added my predictions in the lighter colors. I’m figuring that the Fed will be relentless and the higher rates in the second half of the year will cause the pricing gap between sellers and buyers to be tougher to bridge.
It’s because there will be some decent sales in April and May that keep sellers optimistic that the perfect buyers are coming tomorrow….or next week….or well, heck, let’s just wait until 2024.
Here is the graph from last year:
For our contest participants, there are 120 new listings this month – and we’ve had 36 new listings every week for the last three weeks. It means our contest should wind up around 170-180 listings?
KCM is a fine group of people who supply realtors with content for them to publish in their newsletters, social media, etc. They provide an invaluable service for the agents who’d rather just pay for content than create it themselves. It tends to be a softer version of what I do here at bubbleinfo.com because most realtors aren’t interested in a deep dive – they are fine with the lightweight stuff.
But because I said last week that “price it right” is code for listing your home for the realtor’s price, I thought I should comment on the above.
UNDERPRICED – The fear of underpricing your home and leaving money on the table is real….if you list with an agent who just wants to take the first offer and go back to sleep. When you list your home with an agent like me and the market responds favorably, I will let EVERY buyer compete for your home and then pit them against one another to drive the price up.
OVERPRICED – Realtors want to be the hero and are just as likely to overprice a home as a seller. This is especially true when several agents are competing for the listing – it is irresistible for sellers to strongly consider, and end up hiring, the agent who quotes the highest price.
The worst part about overpricing is not reacting quick enough. Once a home is on the open market, both the sellers and the listing agent wants to believe that if they just wait a little longer, the magical perfect couple with 2.2 kids will come along. But today’s buyers are watching the market time of each listing very closely, and making up things in their head about what it means – and none of that is good for sellers.
MARKET VALUE – It would be a miracle if a seller or agent could guess the market value. The conditions are changing every day in every area – and NOBODY knows what a buyer will pay until a home is on the open market. Besides, there is a slush factor of 5% on every house, based on it’s unique location, upgrades and condition, ease of showing, and the competence of the listing agent.
The best thing any seller could do is to hire a listing agent who is an expert in handling what to do if the market conditions cause the home to be underpriced OR overpriced – because every agent can handle a listing that gets lucky and miraculously happens to be perfectly priced.
As a way to “raise additional revenue and to increase ridership on trains and buses”, the train people started looking for developers last April – their solutions:
Under agreements the board approved Thursday, West Village Partners will build 184 market-rate apartments or townhouses and 50 affordable units on 14.37 acres the transit district owns at the downtown Carlsbad Village Station on State Street.
Affordable housing will make up 27 percent of the Village residential units, well above the city’s minimum requirement of 15 percent. The Village project also will include 17,000 square feet of ground floor retail space, 435 parking spaces, a 110-room boutique hotel, a senior living facility, and 80,000 square feet of office space, according to preliminary plans.
“This location is primed for redevelopment with only a short walk to restaurants, retail and local beaches,” a district staffer said.
The Village station sees an average of 800 patrons daily, with about 600 of those riding the Coaster and 200 using Breeze buses. The Poinsettia station, on Avenida Encinas near Poinsettia Lane in southwest Carlsbad, averages 400 Coaster riders and about 40 bus riders daily.
Raintree Partners was selected for the 11.47-acre Poinsettia Station, which will have 146 market-rate dwellings and 31 affordable units, or 17 percent of the residences. Almost 5 acres of the site will remain undeveloped under a permanent conservation easement.
Both exclusive negotiating agreements are valid for 2.5 years. During that time, the developers will work with district, city and regional officials on final designs, permits, and other issues. Construction is expected to start in 2025 at the Village station and in 2027 at the Poinsettia station.
Just another 234 apartments, a 110-room hotel, senior facility, and ~100 offices in downtown Carlsbad. You think it’s crowded now? There won’t be any room left for the tourists!
For those who wouldn’t mind moving to Arizona if you could find a brand-new home for less than $300,000, you should check out this new-home tract in Casa Grande.
It’s called part of the Phoenix Metro area, but if you’re going to central Pho-town, you better pack a lunch. P.S. They need to come up with a better name than ‘printed’ homes – it sounds like you are making them out of paper, not concrete poured by a ‘full-stack automated robotic assembly’.
The reason for breaking down the active and pending listings by zip code is to give the readers a closer look at their neighborhood stats. We have considered a 2:1 ratio of actives-to-pendings to be a healthy market. When there were more pendings than actives, the frenzy was out of control, and when the number of actives reaches a 3:1 ratio of higher, you know that the market is going the other way.
Lately, the ratio has benefitted from cancellations, and today’s A/P ratio is close to the June level:
The number of choices today is anemic, and not that much different than the frenzy levels. The combined totals of actives and pendings (underlined in purple above):
Feb: 384
Mar: 386
Jan: 386
Fewer are selling now because of listing exhaustion.
Of the 105 new listings in January:
Number of those on the market in 4Q22, and refreshed as a new listing this month: 44
Number of January listings that were purchased in 2020: 13
Number of January listings that were purchased in 2021 or later: 19
You can say that the inventory of exciting new offerings is extremely tight, especially for those buyers who have been looking since 2020 – you’ve previously seen 72% of the ‘new’ listings.
In 2020, we had 400+ pendings from June 22nd to November 30th – with a peak of 491 pendings on September 7th.
This home was listed in August for $2,895,000 with a different Compass agent who had lowered the price down to $2,500,000 by October 6th but then cancelled.
The new listing agent started on December 1st at $2,749,000, and sixteen days later found the buyer. It sold for $2,715,000:
I still haven’t heard anything regarding the development of the Encina Power Plant property…..but there is a new idea for it. The company is also building a device to power your home for 400 years!
Our company ECD Energy Corp is interested in purchasing the NRG property where the Encina smokestack was located. We are interested in building a desalination plant that will provide water to all of Southern California with energy produced by our (soon to be released to the public) electro-kinetic power generation device which does not use any carbon fuel. This would be excellent for the community of San Diego, provide water at a fraction of the cost and revolutionize desalination worldwide-with San Diego as the leader in this new technology. We are a San Diego based company.
