Artificial Housing Inventory in Charlottesville

I’m guilty of this, too.

For houses that come on the market in Charlottesville and the Charlottesville area, what I’m seeing is this

Home is listed as a Coming Soon on Monday/Tuesday so that we Realtors can tee up our buyers.
House is activated on Wednesday/Thursday for buyers to see in the MLS and Zillow/Realtor.com/etc.
Showings are held Friday through Sunday

Offers to be reviewed …

All offers, if any, due by Monday at 12pm and will be review Tuesday.
Showings begin Friday 3/24, by appointment only. Open House Sun … 1-3PM. Offers will begin to be negotiated after 12PM on Monday.
Offers, if any are received, will be reviewed starting at 5:00PM on Monday and responded to by 5:00PM on Tuesday.
All offers will be reviewed on Monday morning. The Seller reserves the right to accept an offer prior to that time.
Kindly submit offers by 7pm (Monday). Any offers that are submitted will be reviewed on 3/27. Seller reserve the right to extend the deadline.

For Sellers, this can be great.

You do the work, get the house ready, get out of town, and come home to look at offers. Nice, right?

If you’re priced correctly.

Price Matters

Or, the two weekends of disappointment theory.

106 resale homes were listed in January 2022 in Charlottesville and Albemarle. 71* of those went under contract. 92 went under contract by 2/08/2022 (when I started this note) and 101 by 22 February.

If you’re not under contract after the first two weekends, you might be overpriced. In other words, if you’re not under contract after the first two weekends, a price reduction might be in order, because today’s buyers are watching the market in their specific market segment like proverbial hawks. They know the market.

— thinking about Selling your home in Charlottesville? Start here.

Interactive chart is here.

For Buyers, this can be challenging

Four houses come on the market that might fit. Yay!?

They all have offers due on Monday, so you have to pick one. Just one.

What if you lose?

The others that would have fit are gone now, too.

I don’t have much to say on this other than, as a buyer and as a buyer’s agent, this kind of sucks. Because the second best would have been good, too.

This is why we do the legwork to figure out which of the four fits you best, and you make your best offer with which you’re comfortable.

The market is.

If you’re a seller looking to capitalize on this market, the short window of marketing might be good. When I pondered this blog post and idea on Twitter, a response was:

I don’t understand why sellers don’t wait longer to collect offers? It’s like running an auction but only taking the first 5 bids.

This is exactly what I tell my clients, buyers or sellers:

When the house hits the market, and the buyers get the notification on Zillow (it’s going to be Zillow, if they don’t have MLS emails from their buyer agent), the clock starts ticking for the seller.

The buyers who are actively looking will get that notification and immediately text or email their agent to see the house as soon as possible.

They’ll see the house, and if they like it enough, they’ll make make an offer.

By the time two weekend have gone by, all the buyers who are currently actively looking have seen the house, either online and dismissed it, or in person and either made an offer or opted to not make an offer.

After 15 days with no offers, the seller is waiting for life to happen for a buyer – marriage, divorce, job transfer, new kid, kid moving out, new dogs or cats … life. Sometimes it’s better to price the house to move quickly so as to not wait for life to happen to someone else.

Shortening the decision time can be advantageous to the seller and stressful (especially if they don’t get offers), frustrating and stressful to the buyers, and an all around more stressful situation for all involved.

But it works, for now.