Okay so perhaps we are actually in agreement here. I do believe that the median price indicator is a useful component that is useful in studying the macroscopic aspects of the market and trends.
My problem is that on a daily basis I deal with individuals who do not take ANY of the other components into account. Today…this day… Dec 19th… I have a listing in San Carlos on Royal Gorge… you guys can look it up… Nothing special about this home. It is actually a perfect study in how sellers do not cope with declining markets correctly. They have been chasing the market down for months and months. They priced incorrectly to begin with, (against my advice) and are currently at 499k. They got an offer at 469k and they buyer requested 3% back for credits. Now I have been bumping heads with them on the counter offer. The wife wants to summarily reject the offer altogether. Even though there is a SOLD comp at 475k on the SAME street! She points to the median price all the time…
Arrrrrrrrrrgggggg… So again, the problem as I see it, is that there are no other useful statistics out there that are fed to joe public who wants to sell his home…
Here is a question for all of you out there. Many post here and say yeah I don’t need a realtor, I can sell my home as it is easy to do… Hey that is okay with me, no argument. So you all priced your home based on whatever comps you dug up. How many of you actually sold a property in a down market like this? Also when you priced your home did you have any idea how many homes did not sell in your area? How many expireds, cancelleds or withdrawns there were? My bet is that most of you have answered no to these two questions.
The point of the above questions is not to convince anyone to use a Realtor. It is simply to convey that the public is not given enough information to make well informed decisions. I think alot of this feeds fuel to the sticky on the way down mechanism. It can be argued that the Realtor should inform the client of all these facts and I do! However not all Realtors do that. Some will point to the median or point to outdated sales simply to get the listing and then lower the price after the home sits there…
So yes jg, I agree… all people should look at ALL of the symptoms of the problem. The main problem is definitely lack of buyers. Median price movement is a symptom just like higher inventory and more failures to sell. Each of them are important.
