Happy New Year!!! We hope that you enjoyed your holidays spent with family and friends. As I write this, it is the week between Christmas and New Year’s-a time that generally is slower and allows time to be spent with family and friends who have come into town to celebrate together. It is always a nice time to reflect back on the year and look forward to the year ahead. Following this time is the spring market which will typically start a few short weeks from now, so a bit of time to rest and reflect is always welcome. We hope you are able to take some time to do the same as finding quiet and reflective time in this fast-paced world has gotten harder and harder.
This holiday season, Kylie has been able to take a couple of weeks off at the end of the year for a much-needed vacation with her family. Thea has also taken a week off to spend time with her family in Cleveland. Next Christmas and every one thereafter will be MUCH different with a child. It is always so fun to relive the wonder, excitement and joy of Christmas through a child’s eyes.
Steve and Thea had a big day 2 weeks ago when they were sworn in as the Chairman of The Board of Directors and Chairwoman of the Young Professionals Council, respectively of the Westfield Chamber of Commerce! Westfield is the fastest-growing city in the state and one of the fastest-growing in the country and we are thrilled to take the helm together to help our city grow and represent fellow business leaders young and experienced make Westfield the best city around! Please connect with us if you have ideas to help make our community better.
As we start to prepare for the spring selling season, we have received quite a few questions from clients wanting to know what to expect. While no one has a clear crystal ball, this is what we have read, heard and seen from some pretty reputable experts and most of them have been pretty in sync with their predictions. We also tend to agree.
The interest rates the Federal Reserve have increased have absolutely had the effect they were intending and that is to cool an overheated market, including housing. While our housing market is still at an anemic 1.7-months of inventory compared to a balanced market of 6-months, the momentum has absolutely shifted to the buyers’ favor for the first time in almost 3 years.
Interest rates have fallen almost 100 basis points or 1% from their high a few weeks ago, which is great news! We are expecting them to continue to fall to around 5% by June of next year.
There will absolutely be more inventory hitting the market this spring as it always does, but we are still woefully short of what we need.
Builders have slowed building due to the drop off in buyer demand and their profit margins are shrinking quickly as the prices their subs charge are not decreasing, but the prices builders are charging buyers are decreasing and the incentives they are having to offer buyers are increasing. Both of these contribute to shrinking profits.
Due to the above, many, many buyers and sellers have sidelined themselves the past several months contributing to a lot of pent up demand. As interest rates decline these buyers and sellers will enter the market and we are likely to see a busy spring market again, which may include bidding wars.
Our market continues to appreciate even though pending and closed sales are seeing declines just short of 30% year-over-year.
Interest rate buy-downs have become the tool of the market right now allowing buyers to snag a rate around 4.5% for the first year, 5.5% for the second year and 6.5% for the rest of the term. Buyers are banking on the fact that interest rates will decline in the next 2-years and then they will refinance into a permanent, lower rate. While this is a risk, it is unlikely rates will not continue to decline.
Mortgage interest rates are tied to inflation data, which is showing inflation going down. This is why mortgage rates are dropping while the Fed is continuing to increase the Fed Funds rate.
If you are a seller, spring should be your friend. If you are a buyer, NOW is the time to buy before the feeding frenzy picks up again and you have lots more competition. Spring will bring more choices to buyers, however.
Nationwide, we are approximately 5-7 million homes short of what is needed.
As always, please let us know if you have specific questions about your house or buying plans. We are happy to consult with you about your specific situation and how you can make the most out of the market. Due to the crazy swings in the market, the automated valuation sites are more inaccurate than we have seen them in a long time. Your best bet is to have us come out to take a look at your house and give you specific data relative to your house and your specific market. We are happy to do this!
Don’t miss some of our upcoming events for January:
Steve’s Seller Workshop-The Top Ten Dumb Mistakes Smart People Make When Selling Their House. This interactive workshop will take you from house prep to going on the market and everything in-between. Join us on Tuesday, January 10th from 7-8:30pm via Zoom. E-mail steve@Welcome2Indy.com to register.
Thea’s Home Buyer Workshop-Everything You Need to Know to Buy A Home in Today’s Market. Join Thea on Wednesday, January 25th from 5:30-7pm via Zoom to hear the tips and tricks Thea teaches her clients to succeed in today’s market. E-mail thea@Welcome2Indy.com to register.
Our first Happy Hour of the year will be on the 4th Thursday of January due to a scheduling conflict on our usual 3rd Thursday. Join us from 5-6:30pm at Matt The Miller’s in Carmel as we toast in the new year and catch up with each other and hear about holiday festivities. E-mail kylie@Welcome2Indy.com to register.
From our family to yours, we wish you a happy and prosperous New Year. As always, if your plans for 2023 include a change in housing, give us a call. We would love to help!
Click here to read our January newsletter
Your Friends in Real Estate,
Steve, Kylie, Thea, and Mark
P.S. Please don’t keep us a secret!
Friday, December 30, 2022
Sunday, December 04, 2022
December 2022 Newsletter
Happy Holidays! From our family to yours, we hope this finds you thankful for all of your blessings you celebrated with family and friends over Thanksgiving and looking forward to the holiday season full of excitement and anticipation. It is hard to believe yet another holiday season is upon us as we look back at 2022 and wonder where the year went. For the real estate market, this year has been the proverbial roller coaster, to be sure. More on that below.
The most exciting news by far for our team is that our Senior Buyer Specialist Thea Snelly and her husband Michael are expecting their first child in May of next year!!! We couldn’t be more excited for them to welcome this new life into the world. They will be amazing parents. If you have ever worked with Thea, you know first-hand just how caring and compassionate she is. Thea will be coming back to the team after taking several weeks off for maternity leave, however in the meantime, we are looking for someone to either fill in for Thea while she is spending time with her baby or perhaps even add a 2nd buyer’s agent. If you know someone who would be good, please e-mail me at Steve@Welcome2Indy.com. We would love to talk with them!
Kylie is looking forward to taking a couple of weeks off to spend with her family for the Christmas holiday mid-December. Thea and I will be holding down the fort for her as she enjoys a much-needed and well-deserved break.
My family will be staying here in Indy during Christmas as Brigid’s parents visit from Florida as well as her brother and his family from Boston. We are looking forward to spending time with them. We continue to wait for news from colleges for Ana, but having a couple of acceptance letters in hand makes the wait a little more tolerable. Tali is into her competitive cheer season and is fresh off her first competition where the two teams she is on earned 4 first place trophies and Grand Champion. We are so proud of her and all of the many hours of hard work she puts in at the gym.
This has been an extremely busy 3-weeks for our team! On November 19th, we welcomed almost 500 people into our office to get their professional photos taken with Santa. We hope you enjoyed the day and appreciate you making us part of your holiday traditions!
On November 22nd, we had our 3rd annual Thanksgiving Pie Giveaway. We gave away almost 100 pies to our clients and referral partners and donated pies to Student Impact of Westfield. We also supported a local bakery No Label at The Table, which makes gluten and dairy-free pies that are made by young people on the autism spectrum. Thank you for making us part of your Thanksgiving meal!
On December 1st we had two events. The first was an extremely special presentation featuring Holocaust survivor Frank Grunwald. We are honored to have invited Frank to speak to The Westfield Chamber of Commerce and were the title sponsor. Frank gave an incredibly moving and haunting account of his time spent in 4 concentration camps complete with original photos. Over 230 people from the community came to hear Frank speak including 62 high school kids from Guerin Catholic, Westfield High and Corum Deo Latin school. We were honored to have sponsored several student tables as well so they could hear first-hand what they have been learning in school about the Holocaust. We welcomed over 30 of our clients and were honored to provide tickets for 20 of them to hear this amazing story about Frank’s experiences. If you were able to attend, thank you! It was truly a moving, powerful and thought-provoking experience for everyone.
We finished the day with a more light-hearted event as we welcomed many of you to our final Happy Hour of the year at Matt The Miller’s. Thank you to Walla Painting for sponsoring again this year!! If you need any painting done, give Jonathan a call-317-999-8124. He is the exclusive painter for our team. Tell him we sent you!
We have our final Seller Workshop of the year on Tuesday, December 13th from 7-8:30pm via Zoom. E-mail steve@Welcome2Indy.com if you or someone you know is thinking about selling in the next 12-months or so. This workshop is interactive and you will learn the Top Ten Dumb Mistakes Smart People Make When Selling Their House (and how to avoid them). These mistakes have been know to cost people thousands of dollars. We will also talk about the market and give more info on where we have been, where we are now, and where we believe we will go next year.
In January, Thea will be hosting a Buyer Workshop via Zoom. More info will be coming later. Tons of great info about this crazy market will be discussed and how you can take advantage of it.
From the spring market being the hottest on record in terms of price appreciation at a national average of 22.3% to the Fall seeing that number dip to 9.8%, interest rates climbed an unprecedented 4%+/- in a matter of months, the fastest ever recorded and buyer demand went from a white hot record to some of the lowest ever recorded in the shortest time ever measured. Over 43% of houses on the market now have made a price adjustment, something we haven’t really seen for 3-years. Inventory is up from 2 weeks to 1.6-months in the span of 9-months. It is important to note that inventory is rising very slowly compared to other parts of the country, which is good.
We have enjoyed talking with many of you asking for clarity on this market and what to expect next year as you plan to buy, sell and/or build a new home. The good news is that every economist I have read, including the most accurate mortgage rate economist Barry Habib states interest rates that were once around 7.5%, are expected to continue to decline at least into summer 2023. They have already dropped ~1% from their highs to ~6.5%. They are expected to drop to around 5% by Q2 2023. So, this is good news! If you or someone you know is thinking about buying, selling, or building next year, pay attention to what I say next.
If the overwhelming majority of the predictions are even close to what happens in the market next year, we could be in for another crazy spring market. Here’s why. Many sellers and buyers have stayed on the sidelines due to interest rates and the market volatility. There is substantial pent-up demand as a result. If interest rates decline, we are going to see a lot of houses hit the market (this is a good thing!), but also even more buyers enter the market and we will be in another bidding war situation.
The good news is that there are tools specifically designed for this exact situation. One of the most popular is the 2/1 rate buy-down. Basically, the seller pays to buy your rate down to around 3.75% for 2-years. You re-finance into a more permanent rate next spring when rates are lower. Any of the unused money for the rate buy-down is applied to your principal mortgage balance and your monthly payment stays low for the term of your loan. If you do this now before the spring market heats up and you are back into a competitive situation thus paying a lot more for the same house you could buy today, you stand to save potentially tens of thousands of dollars over the term of your loan. If this sounds interesting to you, please send me an e-mail at steve@Welcome2Indy.com or call me at 317-339-7698. I would be happy to walk you through this and connect you with one of our preferred loan partners to run specific numbers for your unique situation.
Here are some stats from MIBOR comparing October 2022 numbers to September 2022:
Median Sales Price-DOWN 1.8% to $280,000
Closed Sales-DOWN 16.4% to 2,726 units
New Listings-DOWN 11.1% to 3,044 units
Pending Sales-DOWN 0.1% to 2,703 units
Days on Market-UP 7.1% to 30 days
Price per s.f.-UP 0.6% to $163
% of Ask Received-DOWN 0.4% to 98.3%
Active Inventory-UP 3.1% to 4,491 units
Absorption Rate-UP 23.1% to 1.6 months
You can see that all of these numbers are showing a slowing of the market, just like the Fed has worked hard to do. It is working!!! However, we are NOT in a buyer’s market or in a market that is poised for a contraction with housing values going down. We are slowing down and getting back to a more manageable pace that is normal and healthy. You have questions. We have answers!!! Call us-317-339-7698. We are happy to help answer questions and provide clarity for YOUR specific situation so you can make an informed decision.
We hope you enjoyed the calendar we sent you in November for 2023. As mentioned last month, this will be the last calendar we send. Due to technology replacing the need for paper wall calendars and the significantly increasing costs to send them to our growing list of clients, we made the hard decision to pull the plug on them after almost 50-years. We have also decided to not duplicate the monthly newsletter we send you and just send it electronically…at least for the time-being. If you prefer the paper copy, please send me an e-mail at Steve@Welcome2Indy.com. If enough people want the paper one, we may bring it back sometime next year. We will still send the postcards you have come to enjoy twice/month.
Thank you for reading this far!! May you and those you love enjoy this magical time of the year and know that our family is grateful for you and the blessings you bring to us. Always feel comfortable calling us when you or someone you care about needs help with real estate. We are always here for you!
Your Personal Real Estate Consultants…for Life!
Steve, Kylie, Thea and Mark
Click here to read our December newsletter
P.S. Please don’t keep us a secret!
The most exciting news by far for our team is that our Senior Buyer Specialist Thea Snelly and her husband Michael are expecting their first child in May of next year!!! We couldn’t be more excited for them to welcome this new life into the world. They will be amazing parents. If you have ever worked with Thea, you know first-hand just how caring and compassionate she is. Thea will be coming back to the team after taking several weeks off for maternity leave, however in the meantime, we are looking for someone to either fill in for Thea while she is spending time with her baby or perhaps even add a 2nd buyer’s agent. If you know someone who would be good, please e-mail me at Steve@Welcome2Indy.com. We would love to talk with them!
Kylie is looking forward to taking a couple of weeks off to spend with her family for the Christmas holiday mid-December. Thea and I will be holding down the fort for her as she enjoys a much-needed and well-deserved break.
My family will be staying here in Indy during Christmas as Brigid’s parents visit from Florida as well as her brother and his family from Boston. We are looking forward to spending time with them. We continue to wait for news from colleges for Ana, but having a couple of acceptance letters in hand makes the wait a little more tolerable. Tali is into her competitive cheer season and is fresh off her first competition where the two teams she is on earned 4 first place trophies and Grand Champion. We are so proud of her and all of the many hours of hard work she puts in at the gym.
This has been an extremely busy 3-weeks for our team! On November 19th, we welcomed almost 500 people into our office to get their professional photos taken with Santa. We hope you enjoyed the day and appreciate you making us part of your holiday traditions!
On November 22nd, we had our 3rd annual Thanksgiving Pie Giveaway. We gave away almost 100 pies to our clients and referral partners and donated pies to Student Impact of Westfield. We also supported a local bakery No Label at The Table, which makes gluten and dairy-free pies that are made by young people on the autism spectrum. Thank you for making us part of your Thanksgiving meal!
On December 1st we had two events. The first was an extremely special presentation featuring Holocaust survivor Frank Grunwald. We are honored to have invited Frank to speak to The Westfield Chamber of Commerce and were the title sponsor. Frank gave an incredibly moving and haunting account of his time spent in 4 concentration camps complete with original photos. Over 230 people from the community came to hear Frank speak including 62 high school kids from Guerin Catholic, Westfield High and Corum Deo Latin school. We were honored to have sponsored several student tables as well so they could hear first-hand what they have been learning in school about the Holocaust. We welcomed over 30 of our clients and were honored to provide tickets for 20 of them to hear this amazing story about Frank’s experiences. If you were able to attend, thank you! It was truly a moving, powerful and thought-provoking experience for everyone.
We finished the day with a more light-hearted event as we welcomed many of you to our final Happy Hour of the year at Matt The Miller’s. Thank you to Walla Painting for sponsoring again this year!! If you need any painting done, give Jonathan a call-317-999-8124. He is the exclusive painter for our team. Tell him we sent you!
We have our final Seller Workshop of the year on Tuesday, December 13th from 7-8:30pm via Zoom. E-mail steve@Welcome2Indy.com if you or someone you know is thinking about selling in the next 12-months or so. This workshop is interactive and you will learn the Top Ten Dumb Mistakes Smart People Make When Selling Their House (and how to avoid them). These mistakes have been know to cost people thousands of dollars. We will also talk about the market and give more info on where we have been, where we are now, and where we believe we will go next year.
In January, Thea will be hosting a Buyer Workshop via Zoom. More info will be coming later. Tons of great info about this crazy market will be discussed and how you can take advantage of it.
From the spring market being the hottest on record in terms of price appreciation at a national average of 22.3% to the Fall seeing that number dip to 9.8%, interest rates climbed an unprecedented 4%+/- in a matter of months, the fastest ever recorded and buyer demand went from a white hot record to some of the lowest ever recorded in the shortest time ever measured. Over 43% of houses on the market now have made a price adjustment, something we haven’t really seen for 3-years. Inventory is up from 2 weeks to 1.6-months in the span of 9-months. It is important to note that inventory is rising very slowly compared to other parts of the country, which is good.
We have enjoyed talking with many of you asking for clarity on this market and what to expect next year as you plan to buy, sell and/or build a new home. The good news is that every economist I have read, including the most accurate mortgage rate economist Barry Habib states interest rates that were once around 7.5%, are expected to continue to decline at least into summer 2023. They have already dropped ~1% from their highs to ~6.5%. They are expected to drop to around 5% by Q2 2023. So, this is good news! If you or someone you know is thinking about buying, selling, or building next year, pay attention to what I say next.
If the overwhelming majority of the predictions are even close to what happens in the market next year, we could be in for another crazy spring market. Here’s why. Many sellers and buyers have stayed on the sidelines due to interest rates and the market volatility. There is substantial pent-up demand as a result. If interest rates decline, we are going to see a lot of houses hit the market (this is a good thing!), but also even more buyers enter the market and we will be in another bidding war situation.
The good news is that there are tools specifically designed for this exact situation. One of the most popular is the 2/1 rate buy-down. Basically, the seller pays to buy your rate down to around 3.75% for 2-years. You re-finance into a more permanent rate next spring when rates are lower. Any of the unused money for the rate buy-down is applied to your principal mortgage balance and your monthly payment stays low for the term of your loan. If you do this now before the spring market heats up and you are back into a competitive situation thus paying a lot more for the same house you could buy today, you stand to save potentially tens of thousands of dollars over the term of your loan. If this sounds interesting to you, please send me an e-mail at steve@Welcome2Indy.com or call me at 317-339-7698. I would be happy to walk you through this and connect you with one of our preferred loan partners to run specific numbers for your unique situation.
Here are some stats from MIBOR comparing October 2022 numbers to September 2022:
Median Sales Price-DOWN 1.8% to $280,000
Closed Sales-DOWN 16.4% to 2,726 units
New Listings-DOWN 11.1% to 3,044 units
Pending Sales-DOWN 0.1% to 2,703 units
Days on Market-UP 7.1% to 30 days
Price per s.f.-UP 0.6% to $163
% of Ask Received-DOWN 0.4% to 98.3%
Active Inventory-UP 3.1% to 4,491 units
Absorption Rate-UP 23.1% to 1.6 months
You can see that all of these numbers are showing a slowing of the market, just like the Fed has worked hard to do. It is working!!! However, we are NOT in a buyer’s market or in a market that is poised for a contraction with housing values going down. We are slowing down and getting back to a more manageable pace that is normal and healthy. You have questions. We have answers!!! Call us-317-339-7698. We are happy to help answer questions and provide clarity for YOUR specific situation so you can make an informed decision.
We hope you enjoyed the calendar we sent you in November for 2023. As mentioned last month, this will be the last calendar we send. Due to technology replacing the need for paper wall calendars and the significantly increasing costs to send them to our growing list of clients, we made the hard decision to pull the plug on them after almost 50-years. We have also decided to not duplicate the monthly newsletter we send you and just send it electronically…at least for the time-being. If you prefer the paper copy, please send me an e-mail at Steve@Welcome2Indy.com. If enough people want the paper one, we may bring it back sometime next year. We will still send the postcards you have come to enjoy twice/month.
Thank you for reading this far!! May you and those you love enjoy this magical time of the year and know that our family is grateful for you and the blessings you bring to us. Always feel comfortable calling us when you or someone you care about needs help with real estate. We are always here for you!
Your Personal Real Estate Consultants…for Life!
Steve, Kylie, Thea and Mark
Click here to read our December newsletter
P.S. Please don’t keep us a secret!
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