If you’ve been living under a rock in St. Louis, maybe you don’t know that we are supposed to have many inches of snow from Friday afternoon until Sunday.   How many inches?  No one really knows, could be as little as 0 inches, and could be as many as 7 inches.  The amount has been changing since Friday of last week so it’s anyone’s guess.

Surprisingly, even the most accurate forecasts are usually only a few days out.  It’s likely that half of St. Louis will be running out to buy bread and milk based on forecasts that we know aren’t always accurate.  I mentioned this to my colleague the other day.  She said, “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”  That’s the approach I find most fascinating.  We prepare for the worst, while simultaneously hoping for the best.

Forecasting Real Estate Sales

We now know that meteorologists don’t really know for sure what the forecast will do with regards to the weather.  Are real estate agents any better?  I would say no.  If you hang out in real estate circles, someone will always tell you a story about how they predicted the crash of home values in 2008.  Others will tell you how the market is “really strong” right now and you’d better buy right now.

At Deerwood Realty, we look at home buying and home selling with a more holistic approach.  Here’s how I would best explain it.  If you are a home buyer, you want to buy a home.  Oddly enough, the fact that the overall market is hot or cold or something in the middle is of no real issue to you because you want to own a home.  This makes the most sense.  It doesn’t make a lot of sense to try and time the market.  If you know home prices are going down, then by all means, capitalize on it, but you aren’t ever going to know where the bottom is.  And, here’s the thing.  If you are buying a home to live in, you don’t know what the market will be when you decide to sell.  You might think that the market will only go up after you bought, but it’s just a forecast.  Like the weather, real estate forecasts years into the future are not going to be more accurate than the flip of a coin.

Holistic Approach To Real Estate Sales

Here’s what I recommend to buyers:  You need to be buying a house because you like the home and you can picture yourself living many years in the home.  I don’t recommend they choose a house based on “potential”.  Sometimes, areas experience a rise in values, and other times, the values rise everywhere other than your home.  On the sale side, sell when you want to sell.  Therefore,  If the market is doing better than when you bought the house that’s great.   However, if the market is down when you sell, that’s a bummer, but purchase and sale decisions don’t always turn out perfect.

We believe our approach is the correct one in light of not being able to have any ability to predict the future.  It follows that you will be happier when you buy a home of your choosing because you like the home versus buying a home because of some mysterious appreciation or depreciation.  When you do decide to sell, making a clean break from the home mentally is always more preferred than being forced into a bad or rushed decision based on marketplace dynamics.

If another real estate agent tells you that you should buy because the market is down, you need to ask more questions.  Why is the market down?  From what point is the market down?  It’s not as simple as “real estate market down buy”.  We aren’t cavemen after all.