Outer Banks real estate market back to normal
Published November 14, 2007 by adminReal estate sales on the Outer Banks continue at a healthy pace. I know you are probably hearing all kinds of doom and gloom stories but the reality is sales are strong. The negative attitude is because everyone from the media to most of the agents are comparing this year to 2004 and 2005. This is wrong. Those years were anomalies and we will probably never see the frantic rate of appreciation and hectic sales of those years again.
Most off the agents have not been in real estate long enough to know what a normal real estate market is like. They got into the business during the boom times and expect it to be that way forever. The market we have right now is normal. This is the way real estate sales are supposed to take place.
Some people will point to the large inventory of properties for sale as an example of how bad the market is. What they are missing is there are a lot of sellers who want to cash in on the high prices. I talked to a lot of sellers during the time between 03 and 05 who wanted to sell but were afraid to sell for fear of watching the prices continue to rise. They thought if they waited until the market reached it’s peak then they would be able to get the most money out of their property.
The problem with this type of strategy is that when any market reaches it’s peak, the next trend is for it to decline. The market reached it’s peak and now all of these sellers want to cash in on the peak prices. Well the peak has come and gone and so have those prices but those sellers insist on trying and there are plenty of green agents who think those times will come back any day now and list those properties for the sellers at unrealistic prices. As a result we have a glut of overpriced properties on the market.
Sellers who are more realistic can sell their properties. It all depends on the price. So far this year we have seen 1,330 properties close and there are another 273 properties under contract. For an area as small as the Outer Banks this is a healthy market.
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