Weekly Wrap Up...The lopsidedness of the sales vs. listings throw a curve in flipping the market away from a seller's market

Happy Friday and welcome back to another episode of Selling the Rock, your local real estate podcast!

Today is November 6th, Selling the Rock's 1 year anniversary! Last year to the day we recorded our very first episode of this podcast! 🎙 Looking back in our library, it's AMAZING to see that we're just shy of 100 episodes! It's been our goal to connect with you on a local level and provide local content! We've learned A LOT throughout this journey and we only aim to continue to learn and evolve! 

it's been the longest Election day in the US that I can ever remember. We are sitting here on day 3 and they are still counting mail-in votes; all the while the Red wave over the US has been turning more and more Blue. I know it doesn’t affect us directly as the neighbour in the upstairs apartment to the US, but it's been entertaining and crazy to see how truly divided the US is at this point 4 years into a Trump presidency and at the worst of a pandemic which numbers are only going up. It is interesting to see how the search for “Moving to Canada” trended 250% higher than normal during the night of the election night.

 As of this morning, it appears that Biden has taken the Lead in Georgia by less than 1,000 votes, Trump Leads Pennsylvania by just over 18k and Biden has pulled ahead in Arizona by 47k votes. With margins razor-thin and Trump making speeches that he’s already won the election, it doesn’t look like things are going to get better any time soon.

Back at home, our COVID numbers continue to climb, just yesterday there were 9 new cases in Sudbury, 7 of them were due to close contact. We continue to do much better than cities South of us but with numbers rising it is a matter of trying to go about living our lives by taking precautions that can help reduce the spread. I would hate to see our numbers get so bad we are forced to go back to shutdowns and tighter restrictions.

From a real estate perspective, it was a very interesting week, sales were actually up huge week-over-week with new listings down massive as well. The market feels slower, and pending sales dropped slightly but still a very active week.

My 5 takeaways this week are:

• What a strange week… new listings were down massive this week; but at the same time, there actually feels like there are homes available for some of my clients. This is beyond low for new listings though… This is the lowest we have seen since we were facing COVID panic in the face and we weren’t sure of what to make of the marketplace. Buyers were just getting used to having more homes to pick from, that won’t last long with sales that outpace new listings by more than 1/3rd.
• Sales were up big time this week, especially when we compare to last week's 41 sales. The lopsided-ness of the sales versus the listings throw a curve in flipping the market away from a seller's market that’s taken buyers for a wild ride.
• The conditional deals dropped this week, which is the snap-shot in time as to the market activity. I feel like the market has slowed significantly in the past few weeks; there are actually a few deals available on the market; if a buyer is willing to negotiate for them.
• One thing I haven’t really tracked in the last week but took a closer look at this week was the number of deals that were in multiple representations. Multiple representation is when the brokerage that represents the seller and the buyer are from the same office. I don’t really consider that scenario a conflict of interest, but when the same listing agent represents the sellers that’s when the opportunity for conflict of interest exists. On our team we typically have that scenario exist in about 5% of our transactions; looking at this week the listing agent and the seller agent were the same on 20% of the deals. It is a delicate scenario to work in multiple offers, especially when there are other competition offers, I was surprised to see just how often the scenario is happening in the current marketplace.
• We continued to see a strong % of multiple offers this week, the interesting note with some of these multiple offers are they are happening after offer dates. I have seen multiple deals that were expecting offers and didn’t get them on offer dates, or even worse, may have gotten an offer and had the offer quickly fall apart for whatever reason the buyers wanted to cancel the deal. I’ve got multiple calls from listing agents where my clients were close to putting offers and ultimately didn’t, who are calling a few days after the offer they were able to get accepted is no longer in play. For all these reasons, I felt the market shift was showing stronger signs as we approached the winter market. The numbers don’t back that up this week but as someone who is practicing in the market, I do believe the numbers will reflect what I’m seeing in the coming weeks.

It looks like we may have one last little warm spell before being thrown back into the grasp of winter weather, I hope you and your family are taking advantage of the beautiful fall weather to get outside and enjoy the last little bit of fall before its gone. Continue to stay well and safe and we will chat next week!