Buyer’s Market
What a great market to be in as a Buyer today! The wealth of our nation is being redistributed at this very moment. The question is whether you will participate in the movement or whether you will sit back and watch others, waiting for your perfect opportunity. It doesn’t work that way. By the time you identify your perfect opportunity, it will be too late.
Why is this a good market? The single most important factor is the interest rates. Interest rates are at all-time lows. On a $100,000 mortgage, if your interest rate goes up just 1%, your payment goes up by approximately $65. That’s the equivalent of adding $10,000 to the price of the house for every !00,000 of mortgage. So looking at a $240,000 home with a $200,000 mortgage, if you wait and let the interest rate go up by 2%, you are, in effect, paying $280,000 for that same house.
The second factor is the reduced price of homes. The Bitterroot Valley is experiencing about the same pricing as the 2004-2005 era. Will prices go down more? It’s possible. As long as we have so many foreclosures and short sales, it’s hard telling what will happen to the market, but how will you know when they are as low as they’re going to go? You won’t until they start going back up. Historically, there has always been peaks and dips in the market. The time to buy is when you find the right property and it makes sense, whether it’s because it fits your lifestyle and it’s what you want, or whether the numbers pencil out for an investment. If prices go down a little more but you can’t find what you want and need or if the interest rates have gone up as we’ve just discussed or if the property has been trashed because it had gone into foreclosure or any number of “ifs,” are you coming out ahead for waiting?
The third factor that enters into making this a good market to buy in is that there are many, many people who are afraid to make a decision, just like we just talked about in the last paragraph. Because so many others are afraid to make a decision, it opens up the inventory and the negotiation avenues for those that are able to make decisions.
Don’t look back and say, “If only I had bought back in 2011. . . Boy, the people who bought then were really lucky; I really missed the boat.
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