Housing: What the Realtors Are Saying
It seems that everyone has a different opinion of where the housing market is really going these days. Home buyers (like the wifey and I) are waiting to see how deep the rabbit hole really is and home sellers seem to be disillusioned with the astronomical prices they want for their homes.
Realtors are a professionally upbeat group, and their trade association is sometimes criticized for parsing data to present a too-positive spin.
Anyways, it’s nice to see that a major real estate organization is finally “admitting” what the rest of us knew all along.
As the National Association of Realtors opened this fall’s gathering in New Orleans last weekend, the mood was decidedly different. The much-celebrated real estate boom has officially ended; nationally, economists now say, the housing market peaked in August 2005. For 2006, the industry expects existing-home sales to fall by 9 percent, and new-home sales to decline 17 percent. In some markets, prices have begun to fall, too.
Usually, I hate listening to the fluff that these chief economists throw out, but this seems interesting:
“The biggest question I’m faced with is how far do prices have to drop and how long will it take for the correction to finally turn around in [those] markets. I don’t have an answer,” Lereah says, conceding that those markets could stay soft into 2008. But he counters that falling prices, while unpleasant for homeowners, are really a good thing, because lower prices will spur more buyers to make offers, and the resulting sales will help not only commission-hungry agents, but also the furniture makers, appliance companies and other ancillaries that make housing such a vital prop to the economy. And while he calls predictions that home prices might fall 30 or 40 percent “nonsensical,” he can’t offer a number of his own.
And now the really interesting part:
But among leading brokers, there’s much anxiety over the fact that the real estate industry has been less innovative at exploiting the power of the Internet.
With the current generation of computer geeks growing up and entering the housing markets, real estate agents are really going to need to focus their efforts on finding more interesting ways to engage their target customers. Furthermore, as real estate agents get even more desperate to find customers, they’re going to want solutions that help them gain even more leads.
Sounds like it’s really only a matter of time until products such as Cellulist become the norm within the real estate industry.
Full Article:Housing: What the Realtors Are Saying - MSNBC.com
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