by Jim the Realtor | Mar 19, 2025 | 2025, Spring Kick, Stale Factor |
Will there be a point when the unsolds start affecting the buyer enthusiasm? Will the unsolds impact the ability of the hot new listings to fetch top dollar? Or will all listings be affected, like in the photo above?
NSDCC Active Listings
Buyers are finding it easier to forget all about the unsolds, and they won’t be coming back to lowball them later….at least not until the end of the year.
Will sellers lower their price? Today, sellers are thinking, “Hey, it’s only March, it will get better, later!”
At this rate, the percentage of stale listings will be into the 80s by the end of the month.
Everyone is waiting for “the market to pick up”, but it might be a long wait – longer than usual, and it might not happen at all.
Go all in – try to sell in the first two weeks when urgency is there!
Which sellers might have more luck getting lucky later?
- Newer one-story homes
- One-story homes
- Newer homes
If you have an older 1970s or 1980s two-story tract house to sell, then your chances of selling are lower, and you might have to ‘give it away’ – unless you go heavy on the recent improvements!
by Jim the Realtor | Mar 6, 2025 | 2025, Market Conditions, North County Coastal, Spring Kick, Stale Factor
I think most agents would agree that once their new listing has been on the open market – and unsold – for two weeks, the action dies down considerably.
Then the showings, if any, become vague and laborious because all of the motivated buyers have already seen it and passed. All that’s left is the occasional newcomer to the game who just begun their journey of learning the market. Or it’s a buyer-agent who is using this listing to set up the showing, and selling, of the better-priced home down the street or around the corner.
It’s made worse by the lack of quality buyer-agents. The older agents can’t keep up any more, and they have been retired – whether they know it yet or not. The kids don’t have enough experience or training.
The marketplace has been reduced to a single sentence. “Do you have any questions?”
The buyer’s answer is almost always the same…..”No”, and off they go.
The only thing left to wonder is whether there will be any negative impact from unsold listings stacking up everywhere. Will it bother the buyers who are still engaged?
Will they forget all about them, or come back later and lowball them?
Because lowballing is such a forgotten sport, I’ll guess that we will just get used to unsold listings laying around. Rancho Santa Fe is slowly getting back to its pre-covid norms of having a 10:1 ratio of actives-to-pendings (78:12 today), and it doesn’t appear to bother anyone. It’s accepted.
Because I feel the need to analyze everything, I’m going to institute a new gauge today and follow it over time to see the impact.
It looked like we were going to have 400 active listings between La Jolla and Carlsbad by the end of February. We haven’t quite hit it yet (though if you count the off-market listings, we’re well over 400 today).
Let’s call the new gauge the Stale Factor:
NSDCC Active Listings: 391
NSDCC Active Listings with 15+ days-on-market: 281
We have 281/391 = 72% of the active listings have been on the open market for more than two weeks.
It seems like a lot, doesn’t it?
Let’s see if the spring selling season starts picking up and the percentage goes down…or not.
