So, what has been happening? The market is still slow. It's not like it was in the spring. We peaked in February, then in March it started to come down. April we started to come down rapidly. The reason was that alot of people bought because many of them didn't know that the market was going to shift at that time. They bought before selling so they had to put their home on the market. As soon as they did, all of a sudden, the buyers were gone. So they had no choice but to reduce, reduce, reduce - keep coming down in price. We had a very rapid decline in pricing in the spring. From around July or August, it has been dropping - it's dropping at about 1% now. Before, we were dropping at about 5% or 6% per month. It was crazy. So, the market is still slow, and it's predicted to be slow until the spring or early summer of next year, when the rates possibly start to stabilize. They're going to go up again, I think about 3/4 of a point later this month, so that's going to put more pressure on pricing. We've got to get inflation under control - that's the goal, apparently. If they weren't giving away so much free money, maybe we wouldn't be in this situation - but it is what it is!

Here's a true story: I just did a deal the other day - it was listed at $1,499,000. Beautiful house, but I did the math on it and I knew that it was way over priced by maybe $200k-$300k. So, we sat on the sidelines watching, knowing that it wouldn't move, and sure enough 2 or 3 weeks later, it was reduced in price by $50k. That wasn't much but we thought, you know what, let's go take a look. So we booked a viewing - it was a beautiful home, like I was saying. There were no problems with it - it ticked all the boxes for my clients. They decided to put an offer in. I agreed but explained that it needed to be a reasonable offer - you can't go too low - and you can't go too high, because it simply wasn't worth it. So they came in at $200k under the asking price. We offered $1.2M and they were asking $1.45M. The sellers came down by about $30k, so myself and my clients both agreed to just walk away. It was ridiculous. The next day, the phone rang and the sellers were apparently willing to talk. They came down to $1.25M believe it or not, which was about a $200k reeduction from where they started. So, the moral of the story is if you see a listing that is overpriced, still check it out, throw in an offer. These days, with the market the way it is, you might just stand a chance. If you're a seller - don't overprice your home! When you think about it, the people that listed at that high price, listed so high that many people wouldn't even bother looking at the house. It wasn't even on their radar and wouldn't show up in any of their search criteria. In other words, we came in with an offer and had zero competition because they would have had virtually no showings.

The moral of the story is - price the home properly - which is so incredibly difficult to do right now because the market has shifted. You can look and see that your neighbour sold 8 months ago for a certain amount of money but it's a totally different ballgame right now. There are so many emotions involved in selling. I sold my home a few years ago and it's tough. The biggest issue for me is that I like to tell people the truth about what the pricing is. Unfortunately I've lost some business because of it. I see the house sit and sit and sit when they end up listing with another agent. They finally get down to the price that I quoted and even lower because by then they've wasted another month or two on the market.

So. The two morals today are: 1) if you see something that's overpriced, give it a shot - you never know. And: 2) if you're listing and you want to sell - price right. That's my advice!