Selling in a Down Market: What Can I Do?
By: Wendy Patton
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It’s in the news day after day about how bad the real estate market is across the country. Available supplies are rising, builders are cutting back, foreclosures are skyrocketing, the sub-prime mess, prices are dropping, etc. This makes it a difficult time for real estate agents to survive. More and more listings just sit on the market and never sell. If you are a buyer’s agent finding qualified buyers is no easy task, they are few and far in between.
This is a time to get creative. Down markets are buyer’s markets, meaning your listings are competing for the smaller pool of buyers who have a large inventory of housing to choose from.
We hear about making sure your listing is priced competitively and it is well staged. These things certainly can help. However, often they aren’t enough. The reason is that you are still competing for the same small pool of buyers as everyone else. If you really want to get your listings sold, or as a buyer’s agent attract more buyers, you need to expand the pool of buyers. What I mean by that is that the existing pool of conventional buyers is comprised of people who want to buy now and can qualify for a mortgage now. We all know that the extreme tightening of the lending industry has made it much harder for prospective home buyers to qualify for mortgages. If you really want to sell your listings or get more buyers you need to expand your pool of buyers to include those people who want to buy a home but can’t qualify for a standard mortgage at this time. This pool is actually much, much larger than the pool of buyers who can get a mortgage right now.
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