April 2018 Real Estate Market Update – Oakland County, Michigan

We have your Oakland County April 2018 real estate market update. Let's do it. People always ask me why we've got a couple of years up here and this is because we want people to see the pattern. We've been doing this for a number of years now. We want you to see the pattern. You'd be able to recognize what's going on and see not just one sample of what's going on in the market of just one month in one year, but also the same month, a couple of years back. That way you can see exactly what's going on and it makes that much more sense. You can make effective decisions for you and your family.

Days on Market

So days on market. Sixty-one down to forty-six. So that's a big jump. We're under two months, about a month and a half average time on market for a home right now, which is incredible. It's super low. We're seeing homes and again this takes into prices as average. So this takes into price homes that are way overpriced. There are homes that are priced well, are going in days, hours, a week. Again, we just sold in a couple of days a great home in Lake Orion. Just went under contract. I mean this is the stuff happening. Fast. If you're pricing correctly, go! There's not a lot of homes in the market you're going to see right here.

Active Homes in the Market

5337 all the way down to 3881. And again, this is a huge drop. 1500 homes drop in the last two years. So this time, two years ago there were 1500 more homes in Oakland County on the market. This is why buyers are struggling so much. So when you have people, it might be yourself, might be someone you know, struggling to find a home, people are bitching about this or that or whatever it may be in large part, it's because of this. It's because of the drop in inventory or there are other reasons. It could be because maybe you're not a strong enough buyer. Your finances aren't strong enough. You don't have your stuff in order. It could be that your real estate agent doesn't know how to win multiple offer situations because a lot of the different situations right now are multiple offers situations. A lot of the houses end up being that. This is one of the big things we had.

Give you a quick story. One of my family members has a house on the east side that we sold last year, had almost 20 offers on it. You price it correctly and that people fight over it. It's counter-intuitive. You price fairly not above, not too high. And then people fight over it and then you get the term, the price you want. You get the term you want. If the price starts going up, it becomes a bidding war. She was so scared of getting a letter from the buyers that she was petrified and she was so scared that she was gonna want to take that person's offer when it might be the lowest offer or one of the lowest offers. She was scared that she's going to connect with them and that she was not going to get as much money because she was not going to want to accept anyone else's offer. She did not end up seeing receiving one letter, not one out of 15 to 20. I can't remember exactly when they were to 20 offers, not one letter. It's about consistency, guys. I can tell you all day long, all the different tips and tricks and all of that, but there's a vast majority of people out there that know the same tips and tricks.

There's one or two that I've got up my sleeve that we're going to reserve the people who want to know, but for the most part, most things are the right find. You can try to find most of them online. You can find probably three-quarters of them online and figured out a good chunk of agents might know them, but it's consistency. The consistent part. I don't care if you have no other homes or no other offers on the home that you're bidding on or you're the 31st offer on the home. It doesn't matter. You're writing a letter to the seller. We've won so many situations because we wrote a letter to the seller, connected with the seller along with a couple of other things we did, but that one thing though. One of the biggest was writing a letter to the seller. I mean it's so simple yet so easy not to do. Professional athletes for instance, or professional musician, they do the same thing over and over every day, day in and day out. It's consistency and repetition. It's doing it, being consistent. That's a true professional and that's what our team strives to do. Our team strives to be the most professional by being the most consistent. You might have all the systems in the world and all the cool gadgets and Gizmos. You can have fancy this, fancy that, but if you aren't consistent, you're going to lose. I can guarantee you that. I've seen it now in business. I've seen it in sports and it is the truth.
Anyway, I digress.

Month of Inventory

So we have month of inventory, 3-2-2. This is a ratio. This is a ratio for everything that is going on in the market. Basically, what it is is that the rates homes are selling, how long will it take every existing home to sell if no new homes come into the market. That's this number right here. A buyer's market would be about eight months and up, seven, eight months and up a stable market will be about four to seven months and a seller's market is four months in below. So we are at, it's a rounded off and we were probably a little bit on 2, I would guess. But that's how fast the market is right now. It's very steep seller's market.

New Homes in the Market

3800 down to 3200. So again, we have little aberrations, sometimes the price is going up and down a little bit. You don't know neighborhood by neighborhood, what's going on, but for the most part, again, new homes coming to market in April, down from two years ago. This is why - low supply, low supply as to why we're seeing increased prices.

Price per Square Foot

This gives you an average. This is Oakland county's average price per square foot. So if you took your home square footage when you multiply it by this, this would give you about the price of your home. You still have to go talk to an appraiser. You've got to go talk to a real estate team, somebody that knows what's going on and that can appraise your home and look at your home and give you a correct analysis on your own. This gives you a general, for the county, what's going on. You know your home's either 200 or 400. So this is again a little guide, a quick rule of thumb of what things are going for Oakland County.

Sold

This last one is the buyer stat. Basically, this is a buyer category and it kind of shows us how many buyers are out on the market and what's kind of going on there. As you can see, not too much. Only a 200 drop. It was the same the last few years and then only at 200 drop this year. So it's a little bit down, but not too much. The percentage drops not too, too much. So again, the buyer pool doesn't change all that much unless there are catastrophic things happening, like a recession or depression, things like that. The buyer pool doesn't change too much. So as you'll see these stay fairly similar. The buyer pool doesn't change too much. These are drastically moving. This is all the inventory and the seller side of things. So this is why there is such a steep demand for homes. There's nothing out there. The buyer pool hasn't changed that much and people are hurting for homes. Buyers are hurting from. This is why you see multiple offer situations. This is why you see all kinds of stuff going on and people being very frustrated. Maybe you're frustrated or yourself. Again, we have some resources if you want to chat about how to weigh those situations. It helps to be a good buyer and it helps to know the team and people to get your offers accepted. Super important.

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