July 26, 2019 Sales Summary

Welcome to the July 26th edition of the Guelph Weekly Sales Reports.  It’s been just over, in fact 10 weeks over, our 3rd year anniversary since we started this blog.  I’m pretty pleased that we haven’t missed a week in the past 164 weeks.  Stay tuned - there’s lots more to come!

We spent the past week attending the Inman Connect Real Estate Conference.  Over 4,000 real estate professionals from around the world gathered to share information, new ideas and discuss the real estate industry.  

Inman News specializes in collecting and reporting news about the real estate industry.  They organize and bring together some pretty incredible minds and companies for this event.  I’ve always come home from this conference with new ideas, better practices and an incredible amount of enthusiasm for this industry and how we help our clients build wealth through real estate, and more importantly build families and homes. 

My biggest take away from this past week can be summed up in a few words:

Consistency. To be successful  in this industry or any industry means being able to reproduce best practices and results on a consistent basis.  Like this blog, we strive to week in and week out provide the best experience for our clients.  I even wrote about this last year.  

Service Mindset.  Much like the hospitality industry, we in the real estate world are a service based business.  We help find the right property and bring the parties together to negotiate an acceptable sale or lease.   Our value lies in the services we provide - the search, negotiation, advice, research, and helping smooth the inevitable bumps in the process.  

One of the major topics this year and a growing trend in the US of the iBuyer service.  These companies are well funded with Wall Street capital and will offer home owners “instant” offers or cash offers that close within 30 days without exposing the home to the open market or the MLS® system.  Quick, clean and efficient, right?  

This instant sale means that you don’t need to prep your home or endure endless open houses and showings.  The flip side of this offer is that typically you  will sell below market value.  The offer may come in close to true market value and when the fees are accounted for the typical home owner will lose about 20% of the home value as a result of this convenience.  The question is who would leave 20% on the table?  Well, apparently tens of thousands of US homeowners are prepared to do that! 

In really slow markets and with some people needing to urgently sell I can understand the need. This is something to keep an eye on because in my  view  when big money gets involved, the end consumer tends to be the one on the short end of the straw.  

Stay tuned, I’ll update some other trends and ideas we’ve picked up this week in future editions.  

Here's what this week's numbers look like:

We are reporting 50 homes sold this past week, 89% of the 56 homes sold in the same week last year.  

The median homes was 3 beds, 2 baths, 1,365 square feet and sold for $536,250.  Homes this week took 14 days to sell, and sellers were achieving 99.66% of their list price.  48% of the homes sold this past week sold at or above list price.  

Pretty impressive for the mid-summer doldrums. 

Compare this to the same week last year, when we reported 56 homes sold 34% or 19 sold at or above list price.  The median home in 2018 was 3 beds, 2 baths, 1,330 square feet, sold for $481,250, and took 15 days to sell. Sellers achieved 98.67% of their list price.  

Overall, we still have strong market conditions in most segments.  The luxury segment has been a little sluggish but is still performing over last year’s results.  Patience is still a valid tactic in this market. 

See you next week.