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The first home was in Midvale, Utah – a three bedroom home, just over 2,100 square feet, listed for $ 479,000. Rob Ettaro and his girlfriend Kaliana Veros, attracted by the career opportunities and breathtaking scenery of the Wasatch Range, decided to make an offer from western New York to Salt Lake City.
That was in the winter when the young couple had a modest wish list that contained space for the family. Their hearts are still racing over the idea of being a homeowner. Ettaro and Veros offered $ 6,000 above the asking price. The house sold for over $ 60,000.
Smart, they offered $ 60,000 above the list for the next house and waived the inspection. There were 54 offers. They weren’t even around.
Then it went through the spring, their growing frustration expressed in numbers: 70 house tours; 14 offers made; not one accepts.
“Here’s another one,” said Ettaro, reading from the detailed table he was keeping. “We overtaxed $ 35,000, and they drowned us. No repairs. How it is. You just never answered us. “
Finally, after five months, Ettaro (30) and Veros (26) had enough; they stopped looking. “Just the mental energy we used to see these houses and imagine ourselves in them, and it kept not working,” Veros said.
Ettaro added, “We are literally giving them everything we can and that is still not good enough. We felt really burned out. “
Mortgage rates may be historically low, but homebuyers are morale too these days. Last month, the Fannie Mae Home Purchase Sentiment Index showed that 64% of people believe this is a bad time to buy, up from 56% in the previous month. Stratospheric prices, brutal bidding wars, and record-breaking inventory levels have left many potential homebuyers frustrated and tired.
And some drop off their search for reasons ranging from an inability to compete financially, an unwillingness to pass up on eventualities like an inspection, to believing that the market will cool down over time. Home sales have plummeted for four months in a row, despite prices hitting record highs.
Mark Boyland, a real estate agent at Keller Williams in Bedford, New York, notes “some buyer weariness out there,” he said. “If you’ve lost four or five multiple offer situations, say, ‘Maybe we should wait for things to cool down.’ “
A real estate market like this one may be a blessing for sellers, but it is emotionally stressful for prospective buyers. “Every time you put an offer on a house, you’ve practically fallen in love,” Boyland said. “And now your heart breaks – over and over again.”
Thomas Brown is the co-founder of Agency Texas, a brokerage firm that services San Antonio, Houston and the Austin metropolitan area, a report from Redfin. Unsurprisingly, “a lot of people are pausing their searches right now,” Brown said. “The market is starting to stabilize. Don’t normalize. Stabilize.”
Brown believes that this stabilization is happening because “there will simply be fewer buyers”. The Austin rental market is heating up for the same reason. “People say, ‘I can’t buy the house. I will rent for a year. ‘”
Greg and Daphne Decoteau rent in Boise, Idaho, but not voluntarily. In 2019, empty nests in their 60s, the couple moved from Napa Valley, California to Boise for their retirement, attracted by the lower cost of living and an active lifestyle. Acting prudently, they visited the area all four seasons before moving and renting before making a decision to buy a home.
Then the pandemic struck and diverted their attention from looking for an apartment. When the decoteaus started looking again last December, the already hot local market had skyrocketed. They waited and watched, “expecting some sanity to creep in,” as Greg Decoteau put it.
Instead, he said, “It just got worse and worse. Now it is at the point of absurdity. A home worth $ 400,000 sold for $ 650,000 a year ago. “
Greg Decoteau, a retired tech hardware salesman, had a college real estate license and his wife is a former real estate agent. You think you are financially wise. They bought and sold several houses during their marriage. You are in limbo and now live in a 1,000 square meter rental apartment that houses most of your belongings. They too have stopped looking.
“Honestly, we don’t have the resources to play this game,” said Greg Decoteau. “We have our best earnings years behind us. It is less a question of appetite than our financial reality. I wake up every morning and line up because I didn’t see it coming. “
But how could anyone have predicted the irrationality of this housing market? Candice Smith, a Redfin agent who covers Westchester and Rockland counties, north of New York City, is still working with buyers who started searching in February. “You will be in this market for the long term,” said Smith. “The average person would be tired if you made 15 or 20 offers and were outbid by the competition.”
Even under normal conditions, the buyer-agent relationship has aspects of a therapy session in which buyers project their hopes and dreams onto a home and realtors try to translate and mitigate those desires. These feelings are only heightened when large sums of money are involved. But brokers do extra hand-holding these days as buyers’ hopes are dashed and confidence is lost.
“After each loss, they have to be encouraged,” said Smith. “I just got a shopper who said he was going to take a break. I advised them to take the emotions out of it. What I’m doing is a new strategy. I walk them through the process of why they lost and talk about the evaluation strategy. “
Jennifer Louis, a Boise agent who worked with the Decoteaus, said she’s making sure her buyers understand what it takes to find a home in a Hunger Games-like setting. And what does it take
“Sometimes you literally have to make a decision in an hour,” said Louis. “Sometimes not even. There is a line at the door. You have 15 minutes to tour the house and make a decision.
“I need people who are reactive and available. I’ve had others they didn’t call me for a day or two. Well it’s gone. You need to take time out from work. You have to fly into town or do whatever it takes. “
For any buyer who is serious about competing, looking for an apartment has become an all-consuming second job. This level of engagement, often without rewards, also leads to buyer burnout.
Ettaro and Veros saw between five and ten houses a week, spent hours scanning online listings, and made a living on take-out while driving to open houses in more distant areas that they could better afford. Instead of hiking or mountain biking on the weekend, activities they both love to do, they travel to homes they almost can’t get and argue.
“We had an argument about, ‘Hey, do you want to look at five houses today?'” Said Ettaro.
“We have come to the conclusion that this clearly concerns us. We need to take a step back and relax for a minute and see how things go, ”Veros said.
Given this stiff competition, buyers tend to fall into two camps: those who become defiant and determined to snag a home, and those who, like Nick Sauro, prefer to check out of the mania.
Sauro, 41, and his wife Ilone, 39, own a starter home in New Rochelle, NY, where they live with their 18-month-old twin boys, 8-year-old daughter, and Ilone Sauro’s mother. You urgently need more space. You have a budget of $ 750,000 to upgrade. But when they started looking that spring, “there was just nothing out there,” Nick Sauro said.
“Every house we liked was this crazy bidding war,” he said. “Then these other houses are just not that great. You need a lot of work. You go out. You’re kind of disgusted. We can’t switch to a fixer-upper. And that’s all that’s out there. “
When summer came the Sauros decided to enjoy the weather. Their current home may be tight, but it is theirs, and buying it eight years ago was relatively hassle free. “When you’ve gone through the process,” said Nick Sauro, “why should you be part of this madness?”
However, for first time buyers, it can feel like they’ll never get out of the frenzy and become a homeowner. And in markets where prices have risen 25% or more in a matter of months, feeling hopeless is not an overreaction to losing a few bidding wars.
“It’s heartbreaking for the boys because if they don’t already have a house or a family to fund them, it becomes almost impossible to find a home for them,” said Louis, the agent in Boise.
Ettaro and Veros have made the decision to continue renting in Salt Lake City, to wait and hope they can eventually buy. “Maybe it will be evened out,” said Ettaro. “Maybe we don’t have to spend $ 70,000 on demand and get beaten by 50 other offers.”
The decoteaus are also in a different phase of life, but facing the same dilemma, on the sidelines and feel less burned out than burned out.
“We’re sitting here trying to figure out what the hell we’re going to do,” said Greg Decoteau. “We’re not sure we can stay here. We are as good as priced. “
Asheville, North Carolina, was among the Decoteaus on their list of places to retreat to; Medford, Oregon; and Colorado Springs, Colorado. Maybe one of these churches is still affordable?
“My suspicion is that these places are also lost in this madness,” said Greg Decoteau. “Our other option is to stay in this little apartment until we go crazy.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
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