Several times recently I’ve been in the position where I have either turned down listings or not “gotten” them because I’ve refused to list them too high. While we may be in a bizarre competitive ”Buyer’s market” in much of the Phoenix market right now, buyers still aren’t willing or able (we’ll talk about appraisals later) to pay too much for a house. Sometimes, I’ll if push comes to shove I’ll allow a seller to list the property higher than I think the market will allow for as long as we have an automatic price reduction in place. Now, all you purest REALTORS who are up in arms that I just said that, I do know that the first couple of weeks is when we’ll get the most showings and activity and I make sure a seller is fully aware of that. But if they still persist and I think more reason can be seen later I’ll allow for it.
So once the house is listed how do we tell if a house is over-priced?
That’s when I use what I call the Rule of Tens.
- If the house is on the market for 10 days with no calls or showings…it’s over-priced
- If the house has 10 showings and no offers…it’s over-priced
That’s it.
Plain and simple…my Rule of Tens.
On a totally personal note: 10 is my youngest daughter’s favorite number. Her name is KiersTEN and this year she’ll be 10…on 10/10/10.
I was out in Queen Creek showing bank owned houses to a first time buyer this weekend. One of the houses we looked at had some squatters that didn’t make it through the summer heat apparently. These little guys (and I use that slight term of endearment very loosely) were found in the Master Bath.
I’m thinking this might be the reason the house hasn’t sold yet???
Note to agents: make sure to scan the WHOLE house when checking on your listings!
Over the years I have spent hours and hours at the end of the month on the MLS breaking down the active, pending and sold numbers by city and price range and importing them into Excel spread sheets. While I greatly enjoy the knowledge and interpretation of the numbers, as someone who doesn’t love Excel or spreadsheets this is almost as much fun as a paper cut on my eyeball. Recently, I have become acquainted with The Cromford Report a subscription site where they compile the numbers and I just have to pay for it. There really sick are people out there who LOVE putting this stuff together. They even come with colored arrows for those who can’t figure out if things are trending up or down.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the Phoenix real estate Market as of today:
Things to make note of include:
- The active listings – see how they are coming down, that means that houses are selling and/or expiring and not being replaced with new listings.
- The pending (under contract) listings – nearly twice as many as this time last year! The buyers are getting it…
- Sales are up too!
- Months Supply of inventory is way down. If no other houses came on the market at the rate things are selling it would take 4.3 months to deplete the inventory on the market.
Things are a-changing…
I thought I’d leave you with another great MLS photo for today.
Seriously, do agents not look at the pictures that they post in the MLS…or does someone think this is acceptable?
Happy weekend!
I did a BPO (broker price opinion) last week for a bank owned property. The house had been listed as a short sale and it didn’t work out. As always, that’s an unfortunate situation. The even more unfortunate part is the way that the owner decided to deal with their anger:
(This was the view from the entryway)
(The “open” hallway)
(Note that you can see the kitchen through the brokenout door and hallway)
(You can also see the next room through the shower enclosure)
(The fact that they left the cabinets intact amazes me!)
(A green pool isn’t all that uncommon these days but it makes for a nasty picture!)
What do you think of this “right” that many seller’s claim as they are evicetd from their houses?
