What do you say to a buyer who thinks we're in a housing bubble?

The response to this is really important and you might want to speak about this just on social media. It's a great social media post to talk about because it's on people's minds. They're a little bit fearful of going into the market and paying too much, getting trapped, or thinking it's like 2009 again.

So here's your response (and it could be a video response or post response) where you say:

"Hey, several buyers have asked me recently, is this a good time to buy? Or should they wait until prices fall? What they're really asking me is, are we in a housing bubble? Right? And the answer is no.

In fact, we have several solid economic indicators that show us that we're not even close to a bubble. And we're actually in an incredibly healthy real estate market and home prices are likely to rise going forward for the next several months.

Here's a couple of reasons why:

1. The number of homes...

Why would you use a pending sign? A lot of REALTORS use a pending sign because they want to encourage people to list their home with them. And they want to show off to the marketplace that their marketing actually worked.

But a pending sign can actually be the worst possible thing you can do for your marketing.

Why?

Because when homeowners in your neighborhood see your listing go up, that's when they're most likely to call you and be curious about the home. The pending sign can help a little bit, but you're going to miss out on the most qualified buyers you can have. 

And I'll give you a classic example:

My wife and I have identified an area of town we want to live in called Echo of the Pines. It's a beautiful area with some nice homes in the neighborhood but very few homes come on the market. The other night when we were driving home, we saw a new for sale sign. As a REALTOR, I get all these alerts, but they become noise and I tune them out.

You learn something new every day in real estate. Even after 31 years in this business, I'm still learning.

I learned something fascinating this morning based on a study from Zillow:

In the last half of 2020, the number of listings taken week by week were about even with 2019.

There's a sense that there's a lot less listings in the market as a result of of us not taking as many listings, but it's just not true.

In the last half of 2020, we've taken as many listings as a nation as we did in 2019. But it doesn't feel like that.

So why doesn't it feel like that?

It's like if you own a grocery store and had a delivery guy come every Friday to fill your shelves with the same order. But what has changed is the number of buyers walking into your grocery store and how many products they're buying each time they come in.

If more buyers are coming into your store and buying more products from your shelves, it's going to seem like there's not as much on the shelves...