My favorite comedian, Nate Bargatze, uses the phrase “I’m from the 1900’s” in his bits. I’m approaching 30 years in the business. I started selling real estate in the 1900’s! I started 19 years after Jeff Joyer, so his stories are even older than mine! In 1996, the purchase agreement was only 2 pages. Now it’s 12 pages, with multiple addenda and disclosures added to each file. A typical contract is about 27 pages now.
So much has changed. Back in the day, when a property received multiple offers, the buyer’s agent presented the buyer’s offer in person. You and all the other buyer agents with offers on the property would arrive at the house to present the offers directly to the seller. As the offers were presented, you would wait in your car. After all the offers were presented, the seller would discuss them with their agent, and once the seller selected an offer, the listing agent would walk out to your vehicle and let you know whether your client got the house.
The winning bid would receive a carbon copy of the seller’s signed offer… even as I type this, it’s hard for me to believe that’s how it was. Nowadays, you zip offers electronically to listing agents, and sometimes the listing agent doesn’t even tell you whether your client got the house. You see that your clients didn’t get the house via the online status change.
2024 was a particularly tough year in the multiple-offer arena. It marked the 6th year in which multiple offers were commonplace. The 2022 interest rate hike left buyers discouraged, and the media had been hyping that higher interest rates would bring home prices down.
Unfortunately, that was not the case. Although 2024 did not see the pandemic-era multiple-offer scenarios in which buyers offered 10% over the list price and accepted the house without inspections, sellers still received close to their list price.
This is not surprising because real estate prices are tied to supply and demand. Inventory is the key. Until there are more houses on the market than buyers, prices will remain. Historically, the average annual appreciation in real estate has been 4%. So our stock advice is: Get where you want to be!