There’s something fascinating about the vacation home market here. On any given Tuesday it can feel like a tomb. Lifeless. Stale. A market so terrible that I consider opening the paper and checking the Help Wanted ads. Then on that same Friday, the market can be bursting with energy and buyer enthusiasm. Momentum builds and buyers swarm and sellers? Well the sellers are still lethargic, but the market, man. The market. This market runs hot and cold at once, a Tuesday of nothingness and a Friday of frenzy. Welcome to the lake, where market trends live and die inside of your workweek.
This fall has been a continual push and pull of this unsure market phenomenon, but today the market mood is relatively uniform. Crypto is surging, equity markets seem to melt up week over week, and the general mood of the country is one of economic optimism. So why shouldn’t the market respond accordingly? Buyer activity is fairly steady at the moment and even though some inventory offerings have been positioned with steep price tags the market lesson from our covid hysteria has once again become our headline. It’s all about the inventory, stupid.
Within this, there is still pause, and in that there is still the in-between. Is seller pricing met without buyer resistance? Not always, no. Should comparable sales still matter? Most obviously. What happens with this market dynamic is sellers see the froth and assume that means a $7M house could sell for $10M. A $4M house should sell for $6M and a $3M cottage might as well be $4.25M. This is where buyers step in and remind them that while the market is tight on inventory and sellers do once again have a favorable dynamic, comparable sales still matter and pricing does not get to ramp unchecked.
Today there are a few deals occurring off market, and a few more bits of contemplated inventory available quietly. The stale inventory from the spring market has been entirely sold, and new inventory has not sufficiently filled the demand gap. For sellers, you have a terrific opportunity right now, and I’m here to help you capture this moment. For buyers, there’s an important reminder this morning. Just because a house sells doesn’t mean it was a good deal. That’s hard to remember, but it’s very important. Can a house be worth less than it sells for? Isn’t a thing worth what someone will pay for it? Sure, but if you’ve been with me for a while you know the goal is not to find any sort of value, it’s to find repeatable value. Can any house sell once to someone who doesn’t care about the price? Sure it can. But perhaps it makes good sense as a buyer to try to find repeatable value, and if you can find that, you’re setting yourself up for success.