Patty Manzi’s Tri-Valley Real Estate Blog

We hear it in the news everyday….”The housing market is picking up!”, then the same day we hear “The housing market is declining, and not expected to recover any time soon”.  Who do we believe?  Here is my advice.  If you are looking to buy a home, sell a home, or are facing a foreclosure, the best source of information is a local experienced real estate agent or broker who can give you the real facts about the area where YOU are.  Someone who can provide you with written data reflecting sales in your city, your neighborhood, your community, your street, or even your block.  The market is ever changing, it doesn’t really matter what happened 6 months ago, 3 months ago, or even 3 weeks ago, what matters is what is happening now. 

The media is overflowing with information about local, state, and national statistics, but how does that apply to where you are?  In many cases it doesnt. 

Here is an example for you.  I recently listed a home in the Windemere neighborhood in San Ramon.  It was priced relative to recent comparable sales in the neighborhood.  Within hours of it being listed on our local MLS, I started receiving phone calls.  I received at lease 25 calls per day for 4 straight days.  It was also being shown by about a dozen real estate agents a day in that same time frame.  I held an open house and it was like a grand opening event.  I stopped counting at 50 people, but estimate that over 100 people toured the home in 3 hours.  They were coming in caravans!  The offers started coming in and by day 5 we had received more offers than one could have ever imagined for this ‘down’ market.  Most of the offers were from serious buyers with loan pre-approvals, and even multiple all-cash offers.  Needless to say the house can only be sold to one party, which means that there are all of those other buyers out there still looking for a house.  All of those other buyers were so disappointed.  In their minds, and according to published media reports,  it should have been easy for a qualified buyer with a substantial down payment to go out and buy a house in this market without getting into a bidding war! 

I know the trend these days is to collect information from one of the many online housing ‘estimate’ sites, and that is still good information to have, but to get the real data for what is going on in your particular neighborhood, contact an experienced real estate agent or broker!