Tuesday, September 25, 2007

 

I interviewed realtors from across the state of Tennessee

At the end of my last post I mentioned going to the annual Tennessee Association of realtors convention. This year the convention was in Destin,Florida. Jackie Keeling and myself from our office attended the convention and sat through some enlightning classes. I also went out deep sea fishing one day.

I did have the opportunity to interview realtors from across the state and here are the excerps from those interviews.

1.Lenoir city (close to Knoxville) Real estate still selling but seeing a flood of new listings without a flood of buyers. Currently there is an inventory of 5 years of "new construction" built so new construction has almost stopped.

2.Tellico Village/Loundon (still in east Tennessee) This is primarily a retirement area with many of the buyers relocating out of Florida. Sales have slowed and inventories have risen. The agent I interviewed told me the Florida clients are still looking but cannot buy until their Florida properties are sold. I told this agent that we too have been getting lots of Florida clients but they have slowed down quite a bit(probable for the same reasons)

3.Pidgeon Forge/Sevierville/Gatlinburg-Sales have been close to last years numbers but inventories have really increased without the increase in buyers.

4.Memphis market- The agents I interviewed all said the same thing. Sales are flat with lots of deals falling through because of financing. Lots of mortgage brokers and some real estate firms going out of business. I have been talking alot about the b-paper collapse. The Memphis market has been hit really hard by the sub prime market collapse.

5. Jackson,Tn- Market sill doing "ok" sales about the same as last year but inventories are expanding without the increase of buyers. New construction still good in the "hot areas" except where there are "too many" new homes completed in same neighborhood. One agent I interviewed told me she is seeing a drastic slowdown in new construction sales for homes $450,000 and up. I suspect it is because the money to purchase these expensive homes has been coming from the sale of Florida and California properties.

6.Dyersburg,Tn-I shared with all these realtors that our sales are good and invited them to move to Dyersburg,Tn to help us sell real estate. I do have a Florida client who is coming to purchase a home from me and to work with me but guess what? He cannot sell his home in Florida.

What do I see on the horizon for the other areas of the country? I see continued corrections( for next 6-9 months) in their real estate markets. When prices get crazy and run up so quickly, there is almost always a correction. We see that time and again in the stock market. The markets will correct and then recover.

What do I see for the Dyersburg market? I see continued steady growth with sales slowing just a bit but still good. Our sales should move faster when the other areas of the country recover.

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Monday, September 10, 2007

 

Dyersburg,Tennessee home sales doing well

This past week was fair week and I saw several real estate companies with booths set up at the fair. I have to be honest and say we did not have time to set up at the fair as we are very busy helping clients relocate here to Dyersburg.

I showed property everyday last week and had a very hectic schedule. A word of advice to you homeowners reading this blog:

Have your house ready to show at all times.

I was with a couple from Virginia on Thursday and we were driving around Camelot subdivision looking at homes and we drove past one they really wanted to see and the realtor told me it would be a day or two before we could look. My clients had a 6pm flight out of Memphis that afternoon.I knew of a FSBO very similiar to the one we were denied access to so I called that owner and he said give me 15 minutes to get ready. Wouldn't you know it, we all fell in love with that house and I wrote up an offer 3 days later that we negotiated to an agreement. Timing is everything in our business and if that listed home had been available for viewing I suspect we would have purchased that one.

Now a word of advice to you potential home buyers in our market, employ a good professional realtor that knows the market. Sign a buyers agent agreement with him or her and then tell that agent exactly what you want to buy. The buyers agreement allows that agent to search for homes including for sale by owners. My Virginia clients now have under contract a very nice home in a great area of town.

Jackie Keeling(one of my top producing agents) called me Saturday morning to tell me he was at the office and the phones were really ringing. I went to the office and helped him for a while. Both he and I are scheduled to leave next week to attend the Tennessee Association of Realtors fall convention in Destin,Florida. Both of us are too busy to leave but we made a committment to our board of realtors to attend. Jackie is our 2007 board President and I am a Tennessee Association of Realtors Director representing our board. However, we have a team in place that will continue serving our customers and clients. While I am in Destin, I plan to interview realtors from across the state to see how their real estate market is doing and my next post will be about market conditions across the state.

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