What’s Working For Me

by | May 23, 2023 | 2023, Carlsbad, Why You Should List With Jim, Zillow | 9 comments

We received three offers on our new listing, and all were around $2,000,000….well under the list price.

Once you get over $2,000,000, the buyers are putting up some fight.

If the only strategy is to take the best offer – by far the most popular realtor strategy – what do you do? Just select your favorite $2,000,000 agent with biggest down payment and shortest escrow? Or wait another week (or more) and hope there are two in the bush?

Those are the only two choices being employed all around the county. Home sellers have no idea how much money they are leaving on the table – and neither do the agents. It doesn’t occur to anybody that there is any other way to transact.

Spruce them up the best you can. Do the open-house extravaganza. Then counter ALL offerors for their highest-and-best…..and then tell everyone the current high price, and ask them to beat it. When faced with losing the house, buyers are much more likely to keep bidding.

I haven’t found any other agent who does it this way, but I hope they are out there.

I had the sellers agree to raise our list price to the agreed-upon sales price in order to send a message to the rest of the marketplace.  I don’t want any of the other listings nearby to drop their price, and I want to be supportive to other buyers in general that the market is fine. Three of the La Costa Valley Six listings have gone pending in the last week!

One more note. When possible, I want to pick the winner on Day Four – it is the peak of the buyer urgency, and interest drops off quickly.  Once a listing is more than a month old, buyers are going to lowball – why would you want to be in that predictament? Look how the views taper off:

When the saves are running around 5% of the total views, the online presentation is being well-received. Buyers must like the location, the photos, and the price to want to save another Zillow listing!

Real Estate Navigation

by | May 21, 2023 | 2023, Carlsbad, Jim's Take on the Market, Why You Should List With Jim

The six active listings in La Costa Valley got trimmed to five with Avenida Ciruela going into pending status, and four of the five actives had open house on Saturday! The weather was funky because a 50% chance of rain was forecasted early in the morning, but it never rained. The turnout was moderate (at best) however, and we had one threat of an offer.

We are the least-expensive of the bunch now, and should be the next to drop into the pending category just because of that – but you never know. Camino Serbal has gone quiet and is the one for sale that’s not doing open houses (after having three last weekend), so I think they must be close to a deal.

If we do get one or more offers and can make a deal in the next day or two, it will leave the three in the middle vying for the attention of the remaining buyers:

This is where it will get a little queasy with my sellers.

If we can get into escrow now, and then those three go down later, it might feel like we left money on the table if they end up closing for more. But they might not sell for those prices, or even sell at all.

We’re all in flight, hoping to navigate through a crowded space. Land the plane!

https://www.compass.com/app/listing/2150-corte-cidro-carlsbad-ca-92009/1313902473431353361

Local Zillow Estimates

by | May 17, 2023 | 2023, Zillow

Here are the Zillow estimates of appreciation over the next year – all are back into positive territory! If they are reading it correctly, it means they will have more increases coming over the next couple of months before the appreciation rate relaxes during the off-season.

Their accuracy doesn’t matter – it’s their impact on today’s home buyers that counts:

NW Carlsbad 92008

SE Carlsbad 92009

Encinitas 92024

La Jolla 92037

Rancho Santa Fe 92067

https://www.zillow.com/research/may-2023-home-value-sales-forecast-32643/

Frenzy Monitor

by | May 16, 2023 | 2023, Frenzy, Frenzy Monitor, Jim's Take on the Market | 2 comments

Here’s another example of how the frenzy has taken a different path in each area.

Carlsbad, Encinitas, La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe are rolling along with about the same or more pendings than last month – which should have been the peak – but the wheels have come off the wagon in Carmel Valley. There hasn’t been single-digit pendings in the 92130 since we started checking this two years ago! But there are homes for sale, which must mean the prices need some adjustment.

In 2020, there were 400+ pendings from June 22nd to Nov. 30th – with a peak of 491 pendings on Sept. 7.

Plunging Inventory

by | May 11, 2023 | 2023, Inventory, Jim's Take on the Market | 7 comments

Last April was peak frenzy, and a main contributor was the lack of inventory….and there were 48.2% fewer listings last month? Holy Cow! This is primetime selling season and if there aren’t homes for sale now, how much worse will it be the rest of the year?

Here’s how it looks between La Jolla and Carlsbad:

Remember when inventory plunged in April, 2020 because nobody wanted to let anyone in their house?

I’d love to go back to those days!

While other metro areas have YoY inventory exploding, we still have enough demand to cause the active-inventory count to decline year-over-year:

Link to Bill’s article

Subdued Frenzy

by | May 10, 2023 | 2023, Carlsbad, Encinitas, Frenzy, Jim's Take on the Market, Why You Should List With Jim

We closed escrow yesterday in La Costa Valley! The seller is a bubbleinfo reader so obviously we have analyzed our results carefully over the last month. We felt that we did everything right in preparing what we thought was a superior home in the tract and utilized an attractive price, but it wasn’t enough to set off a wild bidding war like back in the frenzy days.

We received five offers, but when presented with the opportunity to submit their highest-and-best price, NONE of the buyers were willing to go up. It made this sales price feel like full retail and differ greatly from the covid-frenzy ultra-low interest rate days when buyers were desperate and would pay any price to win.

Now buyers seem to be patient with today’s shortage of homes for sale and would rather wait, than go crazy on price (there were two higher-priced sales of this model during peak frenzy last year).

Same thing here with six buyers yesterday, where it was very orderly and nobody went nuts on price:

Or maybe the group of homes that deserve a wild bidding war is much smaller than it used to be? This is peak season, so any remaining exuberance should be worked out by July/August.

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