The buyers market reality!
For the past six years it seemed all it took to sell a house was to stick a "For Sale" sign on the lawn and wait for the bidding war to begin. In just months, however, the rules of the game have changed. Bidding wars are over, open houses don't attract the same crowds and homes are languishing for much longer on the market. In short, the deals aren't getting done.
I spent a few minutes with Frances Braam the owner of Royal LePage Realty discussing the situation in the industry as we see it today.
“There is more low end product available and it is good quality. That is one of the opportunities right now. If you’re moving from the lower end to the middle your opportunities to buy a home may never be better than they are today because the gap in Rutland and Glenrosa for instance hasn’t shrunk as much as the houses in the middle part of the market. So move-up buyers today have a tremendous opportunity. That is probably the best part of what is happening out there right now. The buyer opportunity is great. The selection and most people that have bought in the last eight years had to buy and they made economic decisions, not emotional decisions. They were in the market and they had to buy.
Right now in the market there are 292 unfinished homes in different stages of finishing. That really is nothing. Don’t forget we have been building fifteen hundred homes a year and yet it may take eight months to clean up that inventory. In reality it means no new houses will be built until that inventory is sold and the market will be profitable again. Ask anyone if they think the population here will be higher next year and the year after and the year after that in Kelowna and the answer will be yes.
The other thing that is interesting is that if I am somewhere like Toronto and the market has gone south, there's lots of pessimism in the air, am I going to wait four or five years to see this cycle turn again? I’m fifty-seven years old. I am not going to wait two or three more years - I am going to make that move. I want to enjoy what's left of my life in the Okanagan. So they lose a couple of hundred on the house in Toronto".
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