I can tell that the housing recovery is really gaining some traction.
No. It’s not from looking at reams of data. Bar charts and pie charts and lots of spreadsheets. I don’t need to look at the Case-Shiller Index or the positive spin put out by the National Association of Realtors.
All I have to do is sit back a listen to my phone ring and e-mail box fill up with pleas from mortgage loan officers and lead generation websites. The mortgage loan officers want to take me to lunch or buy me a coffee. The ones that know their chance with me are between slim and none send me an e-mail newsletter once a week with “market trends” for the mortgage industry combined with little snippets of economic analysis that means close to nothing.
Title companies get into the fray, to a lesser extent, too. They’ll offer to hold open houses that Realtors will hold for other Realtors (not to be confused with the open house your Realtor hold for the public on any given Sunday). They are starting to offer things like the home warranty that a seller would normally offer. Yes, they’ll even take me to lunch.
Here’s the deal:
Lead Generation Companies
Realtors need a steady flow of home buyers and home sellers. If you are only going to move once every seven to ten years, I need to know lots and lots of people who are selling and buying homes. Normally, I would like to get referrals from my past clients, my friends and other people I know who like me. That would be the absolute best. However, that doesn’t happen nearly as much I as I would like.
Lead generation providers thrive off the fantasy that lots of Realtors have that there are tons of individual home buyers chomping at the bit to buy a house. The fantasy includes the notion that a lot of these potential home buyers can qualify for a mortgage. The fact is that there are a lot of home buyers in the marketplace but there are not nearly as many as these lead generation machines would have us think. Fewer still will qualify for a mortgage.
These are companies that go through all the Multiple Listing Service data and look for homes that are on the market. They create their own websites with all this fancy Search Engine Optimization in order to attract potential home buyers to leave their name and e-mail address. They pass this on to Realtors for a fee. Or, if they’re one of the big Kahunas, they’ll just want to sell me advertising outright with the promise that gobs and gobs of potential home buyers will see my lovely face and contact information and call me up.
Mortgage Loan Officers
The reason mortgage people love Realtors is that, well, we know a lot of people who want to buy homes.
You see, any individual home buyer may use the services of a mortgage loan officer once every three or four years. That’s if they refinance a lot. Most people don’t actually move that often. The average is about once every seven to ten years. So the mortgage loan officer needs to create a little more business than that. Enter the Realtor. The Realtor works with many buyers much more frequently. A good Realtor with a steady client flow can be a gold mine for the right relationship with the right mortgage loan officer.
Thus, a lot of mortgage professionals develop lots of different programs or ways to help Realtors and/or their home buyer clients. Sometimes, it’s just a wide variety of mortgage products designed to help people with challenged credit scores. Ot programs to help people with very little cash savings. Or programs to pay to fix up homes that need fixing up.
The Housing Recovery
All this activity tells me that the housing recovery is well underway and that everyone is gearing up for a strong and robust Spring market.
It’s been bone chilling cold in the Maryland Suburbs of Washington, DC and the snow on top of it hasn’t helped. That won’t last forever. In fact there are actually home buyers looking for homes in this horrible weather. People do.
I don’t need to look at stats and graphs, though. It’s just a quick look at my e-mail and a quick listen to my voice mail and I know we’re in for a great ride.
via:http://mdsuburbanhomes.com/2014/02/10/housing-recovery/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheMdSuburbsOfDC+%28The+MD+Suburbs+of+DC%29#.UxGJCuOSwpk
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