Podcast - 6/30/23

I'm Jay Day.

And Christina Day.

And we are here with our weekly podcast with a little surprise guest. You don't hear our deep voice friend Tom. He was taking a little bit of a breather this week and getting prepared for everything. So decided to bring in my better half and the smarter half of our relationship.

So sweet.

And as I told her, now she's going to be in the spotlight. So I'm going to let her talk about what's going on in the real estate market.

Oh my. Well, that's kind of a broad question Jay Day. So it's interesting the market is not performing with regard to units. That's the number of transactions this year that they had,

AKA houses,

Yes. That they had anticipated would be, were actually down about 17% of number of sales across the United States. Now, obviously there's different areas that outperform others, but overall there's a 17% decline in the amount of houses that are actually selling. And part of that is, is there's just not enough inventory of homes available for people to buy.

Well, one of the things, and I wasn't going to talk about this, and then that's how it always goes. I just go off in my tangents but I think it's important because if people listen to our show or they read the Maryland Realtors statistics or they listen to other people talking about it, or they look online because they're tied into Bright or Homesnap or something like that, our numbers are always different. The reason is we pull new construction out of our stats because new construction, when you look at the homes that are listed, the majority of them are to-be built homes, meaning there's a lot that can handle that house. And it just hit me because I heard something recently with stats and I'm like, that is so not true. Oh, we're over a month supply of inventory, we're this. And I'm like, yeah, if you count the new homes that don't even exist.

Right,

So if you hear us talk about things and some of the numbers, I can guarantee you with accuracy, we pull ours the day of or the day before with our statistics and we do remove the new construction from those completely. Because it's giving, the way I look at it, if it's a house that's ready to move into, if it's a home that you could actually go and pay for and get immediately, that is competition. But the majority of the stuff out there, what we call ghost listings.

Yeah.

Sorry, I digress.

It's okay. Well, and interestingly enough, the statistics that I'm talking about right now are from RIS Media, these were realtor.com, which is affiliated with the National Association of Realtor Statistics. So these are legitimate resources that have compiled the data across the country. And so it's a little different than when we're looking at our local statistics anyway and we've seen that there's definitely been a tightening of the amount of homes that are available. We are experiencing that seasonal rise in inventory, which is the summer months

Right. Everybody vacationing, having a good time.

Everybody's at the beach. I think I was looking on Facebook this past week and a bunch of people we know were actually down in Florida and I was so jealou. Seeing them at my favorite places.

Oh, it's because a lot of people were still afraid to travel. I mean not everybody was crazy like we were and didn't mind jumping on a plane.

And this year people are going and we did see a lot more of that last year too. So it is seasonally expected that you're going to see a little bit more. So the people who we see sitting on the market are typically people who either have something that is truly unique, a little different, not going to suit everybody. Maybe it's the topography of the lot, the design of the house, something like that. Or people who push the envelope too far on price. And those are clearly the defining lines of you're either waiting for that one right person who's going to like what you have or you push the envelope too far on price and you've got to get it back to where people are going to find your home appealing.

And the condition, I mean a lot of sellers that were spoiled and didn't have to do anything, we could have sold the house the way that it looked. And now when I'm meeting with seller potential sellers, I explained to them, so the discretionary income has dropped in the multitude of ways. If I was going to buy your house and my mortgage payment was $3,000, but now it's 5,400. One, that's a huge amount of money I'm spending every month. I want to love it, not like it. And then if my mortgages went up that much and then my groceries and everything else has increased, I don't have that money to go to Home Depot and say, alright, I'm going to replace all the flooring and I'll be able to pay it off in a year with 0% financing because I have that extra money every month I can apply to that. So condition wise, we do have situations where people don't have the funds and they just don't want to deal with it.

They're spending all their money trying to get your house.

Yeah. So it's a different time.

And we do tell our sellers that if you are priced, you show right, you've done all the things that we've recommended our stagers recommended. We're marketing it the way that we always market, which is above and beyond and over the top. The reality is you should have good traffic and of that traffic you should have about a third of the people who are viewing your home who will be putting in an offer. Now that again, that's based on it looking right. You did the things that you needed to do, we did the things we needed to do, and you priced it in the right ballpark to have it move.

Speaking of that, anyone who is local and was a little disturbed with a backup on Gas House Pike last weekend, that was for our open house, we actually stopped traffic because we ran out of spaces for people to park in. And that was pretty exciting to see. Honestly, when we got the photos from our agent who was doing the open house, I'm like, that right there just shows you the ultimate marketing. We got tons of people through there. So many people wanted to get in that we actually backed people up on the road. So,

Yeah, I drove by.

And I look at it and I'm like, hey, gas House Pike has been backed up for a while anyway, with all the construction. We're just doing our job here.

Yeah.

I happened to drive by while she was conducting the open house and I firsthand witnessed the backup and everybody pulling off onto the side. So to the neighbors, we also apologize for them all pulling off onto the side in your front yards. But that was actually a very successful open house. They had 17 people through, I believe, plus the additional by appointment only traffic that they had. And those folks did get their house under contract first weekend on the market, which was very nice to see. But there's interesting, when you talk about marketing and you talk about results, the pre-marketing, the strength of the social media marketing, we always tie that back and obviously we have our partnership here with WFRE, your exposure matters. So if your agent says, I'm going to put you on Facebook and they have a thousand followers, great. So there's a chance that maybe a thousand people will see it. But when you have over 5,000 followers and you're also partnered up with WFRE, who has over 32,000 followers, that's now 37 followers that have the opportunity to see your home.

37,000.

Yeah, it's 37,000,

Just wanted to be clear on that.

People who would have the opportunity to see your home be marketed.

The same thing with, we end up on not just the social media side, but their independent website as well. And we have our traffic, they have their traffic. It just gets you exposure that you can't get elsewhere. And then we always take things up another notch with what we do on other sides. The big thing is these podcasts, Christina is not used to being involved in my podcast. They're a lot faster than our radio show. So I'm going to end it on this, with this. If you guys are thinking about selling or buying, you don't know what's going on in the market or you don't trust what you're hearing because you don't know it's a mixed match of messages, you can always go to our website dayhometeam.com, reach out to us, 866-702-9038. You can also go to wfre.com and look up features Tom and Jay's podcast.

Jay Day:
You can listen. We talk and give real live information about what's happening in the local market. And our last thing is, if you've listened to our podcast before, we always highlight each listener who we have a house of the week. And this is something that's totally exclusive. This one is 2009 Gapland Road in Jefferson, Maryland. It's listed in the mid fours and give you a little bit of background on this one. You can move right into peace of mind, no major maintenance required. Many household systems were recently updated, so you can welcome home to this great rancher. It's surrounded by farmland and picturesque views as far as you could see. The home features three bedrooms, one full bath, one half bath with an almost new roof. It was installed just five years ago, so it's one less thing you have to worry about. Brand new well, new filtration system, new water softener, fully finished basement, stainless steel appliances, sun porch, three car detached garage with an RV door, an automatic whole house generator, a new sump pump, new ac, new gutters, upgraded electrical outlets.

Jay Day:
So basically what you're hearing there is since the interest rates have went up a little bit, you may not have the money to handle those big expenses. They've all been handled for you. If you want to see this home, go to wfre.com. Look up Tom and Jay's real estate podcast. We have all the photos there. If you like what you see, we make it very easy. You can click on a button right on the screen. The button says, get me a showing and it'll go to one of our agents and we can schedule a private showing for you to be able to see that home. All right, thanks again for tuning in and we'll be back next week.