Many questions have arisen about whether now is the right time to buy a home or not, so I wanted to provide various statistics and quotes from articles I've researched that indicate now, more than ever is the best time to buy or sell a home.
In the state of Pennsylvania:
Home buying went down 52% when all of this started and now, it's only down 23%. This shows that the rebound has been hard for the state, and most experts noticed that PA's fall happened harder and the rebound is slower than most states that have a less severe number of cases. These percentages doesn't mean that prices are bad, because they aren't, they aren't low either. That is exactly what is keeping the real estate market good right now. The market is good right now because you have to look at it as the law of supply and demand. At the start of this year before all of this hit, experts had predicted that this spring would've been one of the best market season's we've seen in the past 2-3 years until all of this hit.
Like I previously stated, I assure you that these things that have happened haven't put you in a bad place currently, because our country has been in worse situations. A perfect example of this was the last recession we had. In the last recession, people were taking out mortgages and loans and not having credit scores or income to back it up. With today's recession, credit is much tighter and the scores are much higher which ensures that you aren't spending more than you can afford. Another difference is that the federal reserve with this recession stabilized the housing market by unlimiting the mortgage-backed securities and they didn't do that with the last recession.
All of these things I discussed above are important because that leads up to discussing the "forecast" for the rest of the year. All of the market experts agree that the market is temporarily softened, which means house prices are high but loan rates are low, making this the ample time to buy. There was an impact on buyers and sellers. Buyers decreased by -75% nationwide and increased back up to -43%. Sellers decreased to -87% nationwide and increased back up to -69% which means people are wanting to buy right now more than sell. They also predict that there will be a rise in sales when all this calms because of the "pent-up" demand from those being stuck in there homes and wanting to sell before all of this started. Since people have been unemployed and spending their money on other entities, credit scores as well as home values have decreased. This could be a good sign of buying a house at a cheaper price and fixing it up with the money left over.
This brings me to my last round of statistics for the day, the Greene County statistics. The average Greene County house before this was at about $164,000. The county's market was looking good considering it's sales prices went up 13.1% since 2019. Now, houses are 4.7% UNDER the average listing price for the year. The average Greene County house spends about 127 days on the market, which means they go quicker than you think! Based off the other agents in the county and our listings, there is more buyers than sellers right now as well.
If you're on the fence about selling, fix up the house. If you're worried about having enough to move somewhere else, buy a house that you can fix up. The market is flourishing right now because of reasonably prices houses and really low loan rates, and once you sign the loan docs they can't change the rate on you! If you have any further questions about the market, my contact information is on my website. Feel free to reach out so we can discuss!