Equity Sellers.....Still a Buyer's Market on Those

We've seen lots of blog posts regarding the activity of our market. Every phone call made to short sale listings is met with "we have many offers." For the past few months, it seems all the listings are either short sales or bank owned properties and they all have had multiple offers. With so few sellers with equity listings....have we all assumed they were getting the same degree of activity? I'm not sure that they are!

I took a couple out to look for homes on Sunday and for the first time in years, most of the listings were sellers with equity. Of the 13 houses we went to see, 7 had equity! Surprising! What was more surprising was the response to the offers we wrote. As I often do in this market...I encouraged them to write offers on all the homes they liked, rather than wait for an answer on any one home. So we did write quite a few.

The response to the short sales and bank owned homes was predictable....."thank you for your offer, it's been sent to the bank and when we hear something, we'll let you know."

The response from the equity sellers was surprising! We wrote offers on 5 homes where the sellers had equity. The price range we looked at was from $550-599,000 and the homes were listed in that range. On average, we offered $15-20,000 below the asking price......and all 5 took our price without countering back.

They didn't ask for another dime.....which really surprised me. Once we chose one, I even heard back from a couple of the other listing agents offering to go lower or give credits for closing costs. I had assumed that the sellers with equity would be getting the most offers...they can close quickly, do termite reports and make repairs.

What I'm wondering is how firm are all these offers on short sales? Are these short sale buyers afraid to offer on the equity sellers because they might have an offer accepted?