5 Bullet Friday...The House That Had Everyone Talking This Week

Welcome back Sudbury! 👋

Here are my 5 takeaways this week:

📈The way I have been describing the market in the last little bit with our agents is ‘sneaky busy’.  For a long time it felt like most people who could afford a home had bought, and it was going to shift to a slower market. That didn’t really happen, as the buyers have been pretty steadily flowing back into the market, and activity continues to increase. Back in mid-July, we saw listings peak at 340 total listings for sale. Since then, we have trended back under 300, with new listings that continue to pick up as well. 

🏡The house that had everyone talking this week was the 5 Million dollar listing on Long Lake. The concrete and glass modern mansion was all the buzz, as not often do listings like that pop up in Sudbury, let alone hit the market for sale. At a 5 million dollar price tag, it was interesting to see how many buyers would be lining up to take a look. Well it didn’t last long; as of a few days ago, it's showing pending an offer already. Clearly there is a market for homes at every price point in Sudbury. 

📋Some huge changes in the mortgage world have shaken out in the last little bit. The federal government has shifted all first time home buyers to take advantage of 30 year amortization on mortgages, as well as increasing the CMHC coverage umbrella from 1Million to 1.5M. The second change won’t affect Sudbury at all, but the extension in amortization will likely make an impact in our local market. With the rates trending down and the ability to pay that mortgage over 30 years instead of 20, it's resulting in a lot more buyer power for first time buyers. Not that I’m a fan of buyers maxing out their amortization, but I think we will see this bring more first time home buyers into the market, likely pushing prices upwards. 

📊🍂Buyers and sellers usually see this time of the year as the last big push in market activity before the winter. I often ask a buyer or seller to think about timelines of ‘moving in date’. If you want to be moved before the snow flies or settled before Christmas, you are looking at a Dec 15th deadline. If you rewind 4-6 weeks before that (average closing date), you are beginning of November, and if you are trying to be sold by that as a deadline, you need to be on the market a few weeks before that (mid-October-ish). And we never recommend just throwing a for sale sign in the driveway (as a seller) or buying the first house you see (if you are a buyer); it takes a few weeks to prep your home and get it ready, as well as prep the market for your home (pre-marketing). Or if you are buying, a few weeks to understand values and feel comfortable with the offer you will eventually make. That means we are in crunch time now to get in before the winter.

📊With the market picking up, we are seeing a lot of SBP offers, or offers that are conditional on a buyer selling their home. This is the transition to a reasonable market, when buyers can look at a home and put an offer with the contingency they can sell their home before jumping on their next opportunity. The biggest caution we are giving to a lot of our buyers who are in this scenario is to try to avoid ‘new listings’ with this kind of condition. If a listing comes on the market and it's going to go in a bidding war, or may be underpriced and has a list of buyers ready to jump, you are going to have slim-to-nill chance of being successful with that condition versus other offers that may have no conditions or a basic condition (short financing or inspection condition). If you are in this scenario, try to target places that have been on the market for at least a week, and if they listed the property with a future offer date, it's beyond that date (this is a trend we are seeing less and less). Just a word of caution when it comes to trying to shop with the knowledge that you need to sell your home before you can commit to buying that step-up home. 

As always, not financial advice; just a Sudbury Realtor trying to tell you what I see on the streets and how Micro and Marco economics should influence the Sudbury housing market. Have a great week and we’ll chat with you next week!