I was sitting at my desk this Monday, delivering the absolute best real estate advice and services Montrose has to offer, when all of a sudden my boss sends me an email with the headline “Data Tells a Story, What do you See?” As you can imagine my curiosity was piqued, and I had to postpone delivering high quality real estate advice and services to read through the numbers. The punch line was that in those four graphs that had been sent to me, one of them was flashing a signal that any seasoned real estate agent would recognize almost immediately. The graph represents the two different zip codes here in the Montrose market, 81401 and 81403. You can see that 81401 shows 3.5 months of supply for inventory and 81403 SHOWS US 6.9 MONTHS OF SUPPLY!!! For the uninitiated, anything over 6 months of supply is the dividing marker where real estate agents draw a line in the sand and declare it officially a buyer’s market.
I had no idea. I had been so busy looking at the Montrose market as a whole and looking for evidence of market shifts within the price points, it had never occurred to me to draw geographic boundaries and reapproach the data.
So What Does it Mean?
If you are an investor, a flipper, a first time home buyer, or you just want to look for a deal, then you really should be focusing your efforts on 81403. Inventory supply is showing that homes in those areas can expect to sit around for a length of time and that additional time on the market often creates motivation. Motivation is where the deals are being signed. Don’t be afraid to write a lower offer, get declined, and then reapproach that seller several months later with the same offer and see if they want to talk with you now.
For sellers in 81403 this means you need to make sure you are dialed in before hitting the market. If you are thinking about selling, connect with us early to have a consultation with you about necessary cosmetic or maintenance needs that will make your home marketable. Pricing and condition are very important, and the people who are coachable and participate in good advice will be successful with their home sales. Even at the rock bottom of the market in 2013 when there were 8,000 homes for sale in Colorado Springs MLS (you read that right – 8,000 homes) I still ran into multiple offer negotiations for homes that were priced right, marketed well, and in excellent condition.
Let’s Talk Interest Rates
The news on interest rates has been stale. In short, they stink, but that seems to have changed in a measurable way this week. The Fed met and we are now seeing rates at their lowest in the last 12 months. A 30 year conventional loan right now is hovering around 6.32% and while it doesn’t sound like much, rates have been as high as almost 7% this year and a .64% difference equates to TENS OF THOUSANDS of dollars in buying power. In a landscape where we don’t know how long rates will stay high, these could be the best of a bad batch. For folks interested in buying, we encourage you to snap this rate up. Historically when this happened last year, they jumped right back up heading into the holiday season.
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