What Are Your Options as an Upsizing or Downsizing Seller?

Are you a seller looking to upsize or downsize? Our market is not moving in your favor, but there are a couple options you can pursue to find the right home.

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Right now in our market, inventory is very low and buyer demand is very high. For sellers looking to upsize or downsize, there’s not much to choose from and homes are selling very fast. 

If you’re one of these sellers, what are your options?

Whichever option you should choose depends on your specific situation.

The first thing I recommend is determining if you can actually purchase a home before you sell your current home. This will alleviate the issue of having to sell your current house, move into something temporary, and wait several weeks or months until you can find something else to purchase. 

If you can’t do that, your other option is to put your house on the market, find a buyer to purchase it, and make the sale contingent upon the buyer allowing you to stay in the house and rent it back for however long you need. That way you can close on your house, it would free up your equity and your ability to obtain a new mortgage, and give you time after the close to shop for that new purchase. 

A recurrent theme of this topic is making contingent offers to purchase property, meaning that you make an offer to purchase a new property that’s contingent on selling your old property first. In our current market, this option isn’t very popular. It weakens your offer, and sellers would rather pursue offers that aren’t contingent on other properties selling. 

There are many options you can pursue, and which one you choose really depends on your specific circumstances and real estate goals. If you have any questions about our market or would like to talk about your situation, feel free to call, text, or email me. I’m happy to help.

Your 2016 Vegas Real Estate Market Recap

What happened in the 2016 real estate market? How is the 2017 real estate market shaping up? 

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2016 was a very interesting year for real estate. We had an interesting election, record low interest rates, and a significant drop in the number of new homes listed for sale. 

2016 was an interesting year for real estate.

In fact, our inventory levels dropped 30% from 2015 to 2016. Why did inventory drop so much? A lot of it has to do with the election. Everyone wanted to wait and see what would happen. Plus, record low interest rates incentivized a lot of homeowners to refinance their homes instead of selling their homes. 

Overall for the year, new listings only went up by 1%. The number of closed sales went up just over 6%. That shrinks the amount of inventory that we have. As a result, the average days on market went down 16% from 2015. We only had a 60-day supply of homes on the market, which means that if no new listings came on the market and we continued selling at the same pace, we would run out of homes in 60 days. 

Low inventory drove our median sales price up from $215,000 to $230,000, which is a 6% increase. Normally after the holiday season, we see a spike of new listings coming into the market. That hasn’t happened yet this year. New listings continue to decrease, but pending home sales are up. That has reduced the days on market further to 45 days. 

As we enter the famous spring selling market, we will see that spike in listings. I expect that the median price will rise a little bit, but not as significantly as last year. 

What does this mean for you? 

If you are a buyer, interest rates are still at record lows. They have gone up about a half a point since last year but, historically speaking, these are still low interest rates, which makes now a great time to buy a home. 

If you are a seller, now is a great time to list your home for sale. Inventory is still low and pending sales are going up. Now is also the perfect time to beat all of the competition you would face in the spring market. 

If you have any other questions about our real estate market, give me a call or send me an email. I would be happy to help you!

How to Protect Your Home this Winter

The weather is getting colder in Las Vegas. We’ve got five tips to help your home stay protected this winter.

It’s getting colder in Las Vegas. Believe it or not, overnight lows are in the 30s already, and it feels like it was just summer a month ago. As the weather gets colder, we want you and your home to be protected from the elements. We’ve got five tips to share with you today that will help keep your home protected and safe, while hopefully cutting down on your energy bills.

1. Insulating all external pipes. Either wrap them with insulation or foam sleeves. You don’t want your pipes to crack or freeze. It can become a very expensive repair.

2. Change the direction of all your ceiling fans. It will increase the circulation of heat throughout your house so that it’s more comfortable during more of the day.

3. Check weather stripping on all exterior doors. If they aren’t sealed properly, they can create air gaps, causing your energy bills to go up.

4. Check all your carbon monoxide detectors. If you don’t have any, add them next to your air return vents. Carbon monoxide likes to settle down towards the bottom of your floors. A detector increases your safety and will keep you healthy.

5. Cut down on watering. Your lawn doesn’t need as much water in the winter, obviously. If you have automatic sprinklers, make sure they are turned off at night. They can make your sidewalk or driveway slippery in the morning when it’s cold enough.

Leaving your sprinklers on in the winter isn’t smart.

We hope you enjoyed this list. If you have any questions for us or are thinking about buying or selling a home sometime soon, give us a call or send us an email. We look forward to hearing from you.