Over the past couple days I have been through a whole variety of single family homes in Kamloops; upwards of 25 or so listings. I have found that in today’s market the pricing of these properties is all over the place. It appears that there is no consistency in the pricing of listed properties and I think this is because of either the home seller or agent confusion.
First, in my opinion, since the market has dropped some sellers are stuck at 2007 values, where homes were 10% or so higher than today’s market value. We were living in a real estate bubble where housing prices “would never go down” or “buy now or be priced out forever”. It is a fact that when we are in the midst of a housing bubble, people feel like it will never end, probably because of human nature. It is easy to get caught up in the euphoria of it all. I have to admit, that was the feeling I got from a lot of people around me, but I personally felt the change coming. We are now getting back to reality and working towards a balanced market, but are still far from it. Sellers have to price their homes competitively to sell, there are far more homes rejected from the market because of price in comparison to the number of homes that sell. To get your home sold, price your home right from the beginning. If you as a seller want to reduce, approach your agent, they should welcome the idea.
Secondly, there is this belief out there that prices will return to previous levels in the spring. This is felt by some sellers and Realtors alike. I have a very hard time believing that this could be remotely true. With the incredible uncertainty in today’s economy from job losses to a lack of confidence in the markets, there are no indicators out there that show that the market will return to previous levels anytime soon. This is my opinion of course.
The encouraging news to sellers is that over the past couple weeks I have seen an increase in the number of buyers looking to purchase a home. There are always people that have to sell their home and buy another. The Kamloops Real Estate Board has been reporting more sales lately than we saw last month. The statistics will come out in early February and I will include them here.
If you are thinking about selling your home, my suggestion would be, get it on the market sooner rather than later. There are a number of sellers wanting to go on the market in the spring. Beat the rush and get your property on the market and advertised to the public before the spring rush and increased competition.
Here are some charts that the B.C. Real Estate Association has released. I personally find it helpful to see statistics as an image or chart, sometimes just numbers are not enough. The first chart is a comparison of all the smaller boards throughout B.C. Kamloops is one of the mid-sized boards among the smaller markets. As you will see in this chart, the Kootenays, Kamloops and Chilliwack appear to be very similar in the amount of activity for MLS listing sales. You can click on the image to enlarge it.
This next set of 4 graphs shows the direction of the market. From left to right the graphs read Kamloops Residential Market Conditions, Kamloops Quarterly Residential Price, Kamloops Months of Residential Supply and finally bottom right Kamloops Residential Unit Sales. It is interesting to see the sales to active listings ratio in the first graph and how the lines flipped to the downside suddenly. I think that this flip took a lot of people by surprise. The bottom left chart shows the strong buyers market that we are in and how it shot up mid to late 2008.
