Are Homes Taking Longer to Sell in Los Angeles?

Are homes sitting on the market longer in the San Fernando Valley?

“The gap between the number of properties in escrow versus the number of properties coming into the market has decreased.”

Scott Himelstein, again, gives us a timely update on what is happening on the real estate market in Los Angeles. Today, he will answer the question: Are homes taking longer to sell in Los Angeles?

Well, here’s what the data’s telling us right now. Like we’ve seen for many, many months in a row, the number of homes coming onto the market for sale is down. Which, traditionally, if you’re selling your home is a good thing, right? There’s less competition out there. What we’ve been seeing for the last couple of years is the number of new homes is down, but the number of homes going pending or going off the market has been up. For the first time in a few years the number of homes going pending had actually decreased.

So what’s going on right now? As Scott predicted, because summer vacation is almost over and the kids are back in school, more people now are now more focused into their home-buying process.

Now, a lot of buyers are out there focused again looking for properties, but there’s a caveat. For the past several months, a home may have receive 15-20 offers, now, it may receive 2-3 and might take one to 3 weeks to sell instead of just days. On the bright side, the price you can still sell your home is higher than it was in May, June or July.

The first reason is that more buyers have been priced out because the value of properties have gone up in many cases over 30% since the pandemic began. Second, buyers whose offers were not accepted were discouraged and have decided to wait until next year to see what will happen to the market. In addition, many buyers decided to renew their leases so they are out of the market until 2022 also.

In summary, while there might be less buyers now; all you need is that one (1) good offer. All the offers now are good qualified buyers and the prices are not going down. Just be prepared it might take just a bit longer week to sell your home. So if you are a seller, it is still quite the seller’s market.

If you have any questions about the market or real estate in general, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d love to help you.