The Target House has been on the market for 22 days now and it feels like I am in some kinda weird holding pattern. No landing, no taking off, just holding course. As soon as this house sells we are moving back to Sunny San Diego so I don’t want to start any new rehabs while we wait. We are sooo excited to move back we can hardly stand it, so its hard not to focus on this sale because there’s so much hanging on the line although its the last thing real estate investors wanna do. House Flipping is in my blood, if I’m not renovating something and using my creative skills I go crazy. To keep busy now we’re working smaller deals while we wait such as the Wholetail House which is due to close on December 15. The San Antonio Real Estate Market stays pretty good all summer but as soon as school starts in September things really slow down. Just like in San Diego, once the holidays start nobody really wants to move so you can easily be stuck waiting for January if your listings don’t sell. Although I totally anticipated this, it seemed we might have got lucky again when several potential buyers returned for multiple showings the first week but we haven’t seen any offers from them yet. The showings were better than average up until last week but now it seems to be tapering off a bit. I’m holding advertised open houses and even hung up Christmas lights so we’re working all the angles. San Antonio MLS has a neat feature where you can perform a “reverse prospecting” search. This allows you to see which Realtors are emailing your listing out and then their clients response if they are interested. As long as I see it getting emailed out, and clients checking interested, we’ll continue to get showings. This wouldn’t be the time to start panicking and dropping your price since there’s way less traffic this time of year anyway but I’ve got some new marketing ideas planned for next weekend that should heat things up.
San Antonio Resale Homes are down 20% when compared to Q3 2009, similar to what’s happening to the San Diego Real Estate Market right now. A lot of this is due to the tax credit which pulled alot of sales forward but I sense a little slowing in general here in Military City USA. The good news is that for this same period prices are up about 8% whereas in San Diego they’ve lost about 2 points. There are 3 factors we’re dealing with right now with the sale of the Target House; the tax credit theft of Fall sales, the usual buying seasonality factor and last but not least the fact that we have a specialty property that’s above the median home price in which the most activity occurs. I always say I only need 1 buyer, cross your fingers that we get him during the holidays and don’t have to wait until spring 2011, after all half of this business is total luck!
FWIW, I have been sitting on one of my rehabs for 4 months now. And it wasn’t until last week that we got it under contract, finally. I swithched agents, dropped the price and then got a full price offer, go figure.
By far the hardest thing for me to learn in this business is how to read the market and how to interpret buyer reactions. Learning in progres…
Congrats Luis! You are doing good. They always sell, it’s just when and for how much: ) I’m sure the new agent had nothing to do with it besides possibly convincing you to lower. I’m sure the old agent is pissed because they were probably riding you to lower it with no luck. A wise man once said: “Any house will sell, in any market condition, at some price” FWIW, after writing this post we lowered our price $20k. I wanted to remove the haggle room I had built into the retail price, especially since we are trying to get out of town a.s.a.p. Target House is $379k, come and get it!
ps, dont waste your time trying to read the market, just as you think its starting to make sense something will prove you wrong. Just buy right, offer a good product and know your comps. No skinny profit deals!