Is It a Good Time to Sell Your Home?
Buyers are more focused on a home’s asking price in the face of higher interest rates. In a sellers’ market, pricing too high may work. Now it might be a deal breaker.
NEW YORK – Real estate agents say price is the most important thing for sellers to worry about right now. With average 30-year mortgage rates above 6%, homebuyers are much more price-sensitive than they were a year ago.
During the boom times of the sellers’ market, over-pricing didn’t backfire as prices surged broadly, but doing so now could scare off many buyers.
Agents and housing economists say homeowners selling now need to accept the fact that they’re probably not going to get the same price their neighbor did early last year when mortgage rates were around 3%.
Plus there’s additional competition as more homes go on the market.
At the end of January, there were 980,000 homes for sale or under contract across the country, up 2.1% from December and up 15.3% from January 2022, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Sellers are faring best in the middle and lower-priced slices of the housing market, says Rob Barber, chief executive of real-estate analytics firm Attom Data Solutions. In areas with homes priced below $350,000, prices declined 1% to 6% during the second half of last year. For areas with median prices above $400,000, prices dropped 4% to 10%, Attom found.
Buyers place an even higher premium on homes’ nearby amenities, such as quick access to public transportation, public spaces and retail stores, says Sam Chandan, founding director of the Chen Institute for Global Real-Estate Finance at New York University.
Source: Wall Street Journal (02/26/23) Dagher, Veronica
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