Cliff Barron here with an update for March 2024. The market is hot - and so is the weather! It's warm outside and the golf courses are going to be open soon - keep that in mind (for all my golfing buddies out there).
So, how's the market doing? That's the question I get asked all the time. I've been in this business 20 years now, believe it or not and I'll be having a coffee somewhere with folks and I'll hear, "hey how's the market?" Right now, the market is busy. In the fall, I was saying that it was a good time to buy. Some people took the advice but a lot of people didn't because sometimes it's really hard to go against the trend. People think: no, the market is slow, the market is slow. I even talk to agents now who aren't busy at all and they say, "hey, the market is really slow, isn't it?" And I shake my head.
I'll go through my recent scenerios:
- 5 weeks ago, I sold a house in Erin. I represented the sellers and had mutiple offers on it.
- 4 weeks ago, I represented a buyer in Orangeville. There were 3 offers on that and we ended up winning. We got a heck of a deal on it because they priced it way too low to start off with, which was a big mistake.
- 2 weeks ago, I had an offer on a property in Milton. That sold with 4 offers. I lost out on that one and it sold $100,000 over the asking price.
- 1 day ago, I was in on a condo in Etobicoke. There were 2 offers on that one and we lost out on it as well, by a slim margin.
- Today, my client was enquiring about another condo unit in the same building and sure enough, there was an offer on that one last night.
So, in a nutshell, multiple offers are back but it's not like it was in 2022 . I don't think we're going to see crazy numbers. And it's interesting, at our Re/Max Awards Ceremony a few weeks ago we had a guest speaker from a mortgage company. He mentioned that one of the reasons things went crazy in 2022 was because so many agents flooded into the market, thinking it was like shooting fish in a barrel (easy to make money). They realized once they got in that it was actually really tough. They were lucky to get a client, then they got a client, then they would push that client to go to numbers that they didn't have any experience in dealing with. The numbers would be crazy and because they were agents, their clients would believe them, which is crazy. But now, 34000 in the industry (including home inspectors) have left the business because they didn't make any money. It's mostly experienced agents who are around now, which is a good thing. I never advise my clients to go to crazy numbers because I couldn't, in good conscience live like that, to be honest. I wouldn't have been in the business for this long if i did.
One thing to keep in mind - even though multiple offers are back, I have people that say, "I don't want to go into multiple offers" - but- YOUR place is going to go into multiple offers and that's what you want. So one thing to keep in mind is that even though there are multiple offers, we're at the beginning of the cycle right now.
Think of this: not sure if you're into the stock market or not but if you're familiar with AI, there's a company called NVIDIA and they produce chips for artificial intelligence. They're going through the roof at $23 billion dollars a quarter in profit. Last year, you could have bought that stock for $300 and now it's about $900. Imagine last year if you said, "naw, $300 is way too much, I'm going to wait until it comes down." You would have missed the boat. Just like real estate right now - if you're thinking, "I'm not going to get involved in multiple offers, I'm going to wait for things to cool down" - you're going to miss the boat because things will just keep going and going and going - we're heading for a full cycle.
Keep in mind too, if you buy today and they're asking a million and you buy it for a million forty (forty thousand over the asking), it sounds like a lot, but in 5 months it might be worth $1.1M. Then you're going to look back and say, "wow, that 40K was really worth it".
Any questions, please let me know - I'm available any time to chat about the market - take care.
