The snow has melted and the ‘For Sale’ signs are coming out.
The real estate market is booming, so we met up with real estate experts and agents to find out everything you need to know if you’re looking to buy or sell a house
“We pretty much explored every option,” Amrita Singh said.
Singh and her husband are like so many home shoppers in Metro Detroit, with a quickly expanding family which quickly made them realize they needed more space with fewer options than expected.
“This real estate market is shaping up to be one of the most competitive in recorded history,” Danielle Hale Chief economist for realtor.com said.
Real estate agent Stefani Scott from Jennifer Lasco Real Estate says if you’re entering this competitive market, you have to be prepared.
“Make sure you know what you want, I see a lot of clients who think they have a lot of time to look when really that’s not the case,” she said. “There are some houses that are off the market within hours so make sure you really know what you want, make a list of must-haves.”
Scott says you have to be flexible with your expectations - and ready to go once you find a house you want.
“You have to be ready to pull the trigger, you have to have pre-approval, that means you’re a serious buyer so make sure all of your financing is in place because that will really expedite the process,” she said.
If you’re looking to sell your home in this hot market, there are more homebuyers than ever from all life stages.
“The top three things on my buyer’s wish lists is open floor plan, big master suite and three plus bedroom – because families are just getting bigger,” Scott said.
The average listing price of a home in metro Detroit is $222,000, but experts warn sellers still not to list their homes too high, because they say you really limit the number of potential buyers.
“Millennials are coming on the market, the people that went through foreclosure during the crash are still reentering the market and even though we’re seeing a lot of new builds go up there was a drastic decline for a while that really affected the inventory,” Scott said.
For the Singh family, with decline in inventory they found it was cheaper to build a custom home with Cranbrook Builders which is surprisingly another new trend in the real estate market.
“We weren’t finding updated homes, and after being able to pick what we wanted with doing renovations we needed to look for a different route,” Singh said.
