How Many Homes Do You See For Sale ?

Hey, do you make the same mistake that so many others do? You look down the street and you see One For Sale sign. If I were to ask you how many homes on that street are for sale, you would tell me just one. Let’s talk about that today.

On and on we keep hearing about the lowering inventory, and it’s true! We’ve been very low on inventory, but rather than just complain about it we need to get out and look. A lot of times people are saying, “well there’s only these many houses out there for sale.”

I bring up the scenario again, that if you were to look down the street and I were to ask you how many homes are for sale, you would say one after seeing only one for sale sign. Did you know that basically every one of those homes [on that street] are for sale? Some may be at an outrageous price, or someone says, “I wouldn’t sell unless someone gave me a million dollars.” That’s true in some cases, but the other thing that you want to look at when you go down that street is to realize there’s a lot of things going on.

This is a moving target; things are changing. People are getting new jobs, losing jobs, having babies so they need a bigger home, or their kids are all leaving and now they’re needing a smaller house. They don’t want them coming back, ha-ha. Just for the holidays, but don’t want them to move back in. I’ve had that expressed me too.

Think about it as it’s always moving. So, if you were to look down the street and say, “oh well, there’s only that house available,” and you wanted to move into that neighborhood, you might give up hope. Don’t! I’ve helped clients many times with this. What we want to do is if you’ve got a particular neighborhood and want to be living there, maybe you lived there before and want to come back, let’s still take a look.

There are times when you see just one sign, but there could be three or four houses in the neighborhood that were for sale before and either didn’t sell, or circumstances change. Maybe due to being in the military and expecting to be transferred and now they’re not, or jobs changed causing them to stay. We’re able to go back in and see which homes were on the market say for the last year, or two, or three and contact those homeowners to see if they’re still interested in selling.

Maybe things have changed again, and they’re getting ready to move. Maybe they’ve received unfortunate medical news and they’re going to be needing to sell. Maybe they’re moving somewhere else to get family care, or again we say a job change and the only reason that sign is not in the front yard is because they haven’t gotten to yet. They might have just gotten a notice this week, or the week before, and still trying to get things sorted out and clean the house to get it ready for the market.

We can go out and actually market to these neighborhoods if you have one that you want to be in. Why not put out those [inquiring] letters? Sometimes you see these letters and say, “oh they just want to offer to buy my house.” Well, sometimes they are to just target a whole neighborhood. Sometimes we’re legitimately out there looking for a home for a neighbor. I’ll pull this and find out for a client that says, “I want a three-bedroom home with a two-car garage in this big of a yard, and I want to be in this neighborhood.” So, we can actually pull a list through title companies or list companies to see which houses in that neighborhood meet that criteria, and then we’ll put a mailer out to it.

Let’s just be straight and give it to the homeowner with the idea, “look I’ve got a real buyer, I’m not just sending you some screwy promo letter. So let’s sit down and talk about it if you’re interested, contact me.” Then we keep a list of those houses too for when someone says that they’re interested in selling. We keep that so we can go back and look in the event of having a buyer.

Rather than just saying there’s no houses for sale just because there’s only one sign, let’s instead think about how many are really for sale. Along with what the possible story is behind it, because there’s always a story.

Thank you again! I hope you have a great one and we’ll see you next week. Thanks for listening, don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel.http://YouTube.com/c/DavidCathers42