Are You Trying To Hold Back Niagara Falls?

I was surprised to realize recently that I still have colleagues in my market who believe that this housing downturn doesn’t affect us. Seriously. They took out an ad in the local paper to say so.

They were advertising that the national statistics regarding housing have absolutely no bearing on our market. We’re special. We’re different; seems to be their message. We don’t have the same problems “they” have in “their” markets.

National statistics affect the people coming to our market from other areas of the country and therefore they affect us. They affect the way buyers perceive the market in general and the way they will approach buying a home in our area. Sellers need to understand these perceptions in order to understand how they need to approach the marketing of their home to attract those buyers. If the seller believes that “we don’t have that problem here” then the odds of them pricing correctly, finding a buyer, and therefore reaching their own goals, are greatly reduced.

Further, some of our sellers may need to relocate to one of the more distressed areas of the country but believe that if they can just hold on a few more months they’ll get the price they think they deserve for their home here. In actuality a market correction is occurring everywhere and it will not be over in a few months. It may be a few years. In the mean time they will have lost the opportunity to take advantage of the most incredible buying opportunities ever available in their new city or town…or, dare I say it, here.

As real estate professionals we MUST be educated and conversant about the national market, the regional market, the local market and the neighborhood market. We need to be able to explain how each of those markets affects the other and what we can do to assist our clients with identifying and reaching their goals. We must be the interpreters of all the information flowing like Niagara Falls toward our clients; and not by saying close your eyes and you won’t get wet.