It is a passionately cloudy day today with more blustery and lusty storms approaching. Its dark, the winds are starting to howl and there are rumbles of thunder. <sigh> ((fun fact: this type of sentence structure is called 'puffing' or 'puffery' in the real estate business...so those little 'fixer-uppers' that need "TLC" but have warnings about rotted floors and black mold forests on the walls??))
A lot of the houses I had contracts on have closed or started down the "pending" slopes. Still working a few corrections-inspections with USDA and more than one stubborn seller. Had a contract collapse because a buyer's job disappeared. And then it was July.
May and June were more moderate this year than last with temps staying out of the 90's for the most part which I believe aided getting things done. Then we hit a wall at the end of June with every living banker in SoIL going on holiday with at least 67 percent of the title company closers.
Now into July with strong storms -- really wet this year! -- and hot, humid days. Plus the wrinkles of higher interest rates. Yes, we had a good long run with next to nothing interest rates but now they have started to pop up a couple of points overnight sending some buyers into panics.
This happens. The housing market in SoIL is rebounding. We had BIDDING WARS on properties last season and started the early spring with more of the same. Yet...there are those buyers who insist they know better. That housing markets are still dropping, that we haven't bottomed out yet, that we are living in some other state than Illinois, apparently.
I will say this once again. Slowly so you can repeat it to your foolish, dullard friends: STOP. WATCHING. NATIONAL. (ESPECIALLY FOX!! WHICH IS NOT NEWS BUT TALK/ENTERTAINMENT/OPINIONS!!). Again...STOP. WATCHING. NATIONAL. NEWS. FOR. YOUR. LOCAL. ECONOMIC. NEWS. Especially about real estate markets. Just quit.
Ask a local real estate broker. Even the most silly, fluffed-up, over-inflated, drama-mongering, and negative of the bunch will be able to pull up reliable and recent data from the LOCAL MLS system to give you the real, accurate and daily rundown of what's for sale, what's pending, what's sold, how long it was on the market, who bought it and for how much. Remember, too, as braggarts are so fond of telling me...not all sales are recorded in the MLS. Yes, Charlotte, there are private sales recorded at the courthouses that are not in the MLS. For that my office has to trot on down the courthouse and take a peep once or twice month. In some counties, like Jefferson, you can buy a print out of last month's recorded deed transactions. TaDAAAAAAHHHH...all the info your little heart desires.
Private sales. I do watch these with interest. Between friends and family the price of land/houses can be as little as you can imagine but there is also some tough love transactions out there. I'd bow out of a family that raked me over in some of these deals. That's because the average citizen doesn't know squat about what their property is worth.
Oh, I know they know what they'd like to get. Which is very different from what it will bring in the open market. Yes. I do comparable searches to see what's what. It is not pulled out of my butt. I've actually had several classes by some very "accredited" and "learned" specialists. You have to compare APPLES to other APPLES. Not apples to imagined golden apples from heaven. Using actual and accurate information gleaned from actual and accurate sources very unlike Cousin Bubba or Freddy down at the Circle K.
Which is actually kinda sad, really. I come across folks all the time who proceed to tell me how the real estate market is because Bubba down at the bar told 'em so. Or they heard from someone, who knows someone, who was dating someone who read something somewhere about it.
Hopefully one of those someones will stumble across this blog.
<sigh> I had no pictures of apples by the way.
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