When Will The Market Be Good Again?

After 497 people told me they were going to wait to move until the market is good again, I realized I wasn’t doing a good job.

You see, I am a “Professional Mind Maker Upper” and people count on me to consult with them so they can make the best decisions for their lives and their families. There’s a saying “Garbage in and garbage out” meaning if you don’t use accurate information, you won’t make good decisions. I was letting people use bad information without taking the time to ask more questions and explain some of the data that’s available about the real estate market.

I have to give myself a little grace here because I haven’t gotten much sleep lately and I’ve changed a lot of diapers over the last few months so it’s possible I simply didn’t have the energy to figure out a way to explain what’s happened and what is more likely to happen over the next few years in a way people can easily understand.

Until I started asking the question “when will you consider the market good again?” I didn’t realize the disconnect because almost everyone said March of 2022.

If that is you, you should consider reframing that question. Was March of 2022 the baseline of a normal market and now we are in a “bad market” or are we just back to more of a normal market after being in fantasyland for a couple years? The reality is the data suggests we are closer to a normal market today than we were a year ago.

The mistake many are making is thinking the real estate market is going to be like flipping a switch. Although I am incredibly optimistic about our real estate market in the long run it’s unlikely we will ever see a fantasyland market again and no chance in the short term.

Let’s take a look at what happened a year ago. These charts do a great job of showing you what happened better than I can tell you.

Last March we had an inventory of active listings drop to an all-time low along with interest rates that were only slightly over 3%. We will likely never see both those things at the same time again.

In large part it was due to the Fed cutting rates out of concern over the pandemic and being worried if they didn’t step in aggressively all kinds of bad things would happen. Some say the Fed was too slow to react to the housing crisis in 2008 and in this case, they may have reacted too strongly given the strength of the economy. If we ever see rates that low again it will likely be due to a massive global recession in which case you won’t see people bidding $100,000 over asking price for a home.

In addition, it’s not likely we will ever see the level of out of state buyers soon pumping up our job market. Flush with cash from selling properties in California and able to move to a lower cost of living area our prices were pushed up by relocating buyers. Many people ask me “what about Apple” and all the other tech companies. You can see in this chart it’s not that people have stopped moving here or job growth has stopped. It’s only that in pales in comparison to the job growth in 2021.

We also will not see the investor frenzy we saw in 2021 and 2022. In 2021 a 1 Year T Bill was practically paying zero interest. Today it’s at 5%. In 2021 and the beginning of 2022 investors needed to put their money somewhere other than a CD or T Bill. But today, who wants to buy an investment property and have to deal with tenants if you can make the same amount of money as putting it in a T Bill? In the end it’s not a normal market for investors to be paying $100k over asking price for a home. That’s not the way the investing world works and I don’t expect we will see that again anytime soon.

I hope this information was helpful for you. If you are out in the market for buying a home and you want to be working with somebody that has the experience of working with sellers and also buying homes for myself and working with so many clients call or text me directly at KopaSeller.com or if it's more convenient for you, schedule time on my calendar at KopaConsultation.com.

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