June 2024 Statistics, NAR, and a New Broker for Julie

Congrats to Julie Jones on joining Smith and Associates.  The new NAR Settlement Agreement is impending and the June Statistical report is what it is.  Lots of listings available for Buyers and we explore the pending...or not pending sales.   Check out David's listing at 215 19th Ave NE is Old Northeast.  https://stellar.mlsmatrix.com/matrix/shared/L9xRycDkq8c/21519THAVENUENE

Want to work with us? David Vann can be found here, and Julie Jones can be found here! Reach out! We're nice, and we'd love to hear from you!

Transcript

0:00

Here goes. Welcome to the Real Property St. Pete podcast. I'm David Vann with Remax Metro. And I'm Julie Jones with Smith and Associates Real Estate. Smith and Associates Real Estate. How exciting. It is an exciting change. Well, good for you. We're glad to see that you have found a new home and that you're happy there. Sometimes after 12, 13 years, it's time for a change. A change can be good. That's right. That's right. Pushes you out of your comfort zone. Sharpens your skill set. Yeah we're good. We're real happy for you. Doesn't mean we're going to stop podcasting. No, we're going to keep it up. That's right. Cause we like it. Maybe bring some different tools to the podcast, some different perspectives. We have started to interview some people, other agents and with different brokerage firms, right? And so that's been fun for us. Hopefully it's been fun for the audience and, you know, we've got a lot of changes coming up. So it's. Probably time to dig in. We've got market statistics. We've got the new NAR guidelines that have been agreed to in the settlement with the class action suit in Kansas city, you know, is finally coming to the time where some of those new regulations are going to be going in place. And there's a lot of talk about that, right? There is and that's coming pretty quickly. There's a schedule in place coming up August 6th. The commission offering for buyers agents goes off the MLS poof gone and August 17th. Agents can no longer show property to a buyer without a signed agreement about their representation. And they're not kidding around about it. Your first violation is 500. Your second violation is 2, 500. And your third violation is 5, 000. Pretty hefty. Yeah. So if you get caught showing a property to somebody without a signed agreement, Now, they're not collecting them, but if that happens, you're going to get fined and it's going to be a problem. Well, and I think this is not such a big deal, except that it's something new. And when there's something new, it can take a little bit for people to wrap their heads around the process. And so I think that's what we have ahead of us in the next couple of weeks is people just getting used to sitting down with. The realtor, they want to have them show property, having a good consultation about what they're doing and making sure they're the right fit and then having a signed agreement about how they'll be representing them. And it's not all that different from the listing side. I mean, basically when a client, a consumer decides to contract with a listing agent to sell their house, they interview agents and they. Talk about what they mean. They listen to presentations and then they make a decision about who they want to work with and they sign an agreement, a legally binding document that says that this listing agent is their listing agent and they represent them. So it's basically the same thing, which already happens in 18 other states in the United States of America. And now it's going to happen in every state because this doesn't just apply to our area or Florida, it applies to the entire United States and Canada. That's exactly correct. So every state and every realtor in the U. S. will be making this change, unless they've already made this change, those 18 states have already been doing this. But there are some specific requirements and they will be in the buyer broker agreement, the BBA or the exclusive buyer broker agreement. And we will all be signing those and putting them on file and then going out and showing property to clients. It'll be exciting times ahead. That's right. It's not that difficult. I mean, basically we don't do a lot of fly by night showings here at the real property. Same people, I guess. But, um, anyway, but we have, and you know, these restrictions and these requirements just formalize the situation that has been left pretty loosey goosey in the past. This is the agreement that NAR made to settle the lawsuit in the class action suit that was passed. Brought in Kansas city. So it'll be interesting to see if that changes the statistics and the numbers, buyers, decision making sellers, decision making certainly has an impact on all of that. And a lot of things are going to potentially impact the market. So there's some pretty, uh, staggering changes with the real estate statistics this month. Let's get into it and talk about it. Okay. Sounds good. Yeah, that's my favorite. Time of the month, if you listen to our other episodes, you will know that's right, it's time for the market statistics that came out July the 20th for the June residential real estate market put out by the Pinellas realtor organization, our local realtor board. Which also owns the MLS and that's how these things are tied together. So here we go. These are the stats that were just released. The combined single family homes and townhouse and condo numbers, closed sales are down 18. 3%. The number of units that is, and the number of units that were paid for in cash is down 22. 4 percent new pending sales. In both of those types of properties is down 8. 7%. A lot of down, a lot of down, except for new listings, new listings are up. They're up 11%. So the pending inventory again, down, that's down 3. 7%. And the inventory is, uh, up 96. 6%. That's almost doubled. So in June of 2023, we had. 3399 3400 roughly on the market. And now we have almost 6, 700 properties on the market in June of 2024. That's like a deluge of new property, right? That's double. Yeah, that's double. Now that's both single family homes and townhomes, but you know, we like to jump right into some absorption rates. Which is a combination of what the inventory is divided by what has sold. So it is that ratio that creates the absorption rate. And in June for single family homes, it was 30%. Oh, I stole your thunder. I was going to say, it's your likelihood to sell. It is your likelihood to sell. I agree with that. And the likelihood to sell for single family homes in June of 2024 30 percent 3 out of 10 properties are going to sell that are single family home in June. That's down from 35% in May, down from 42% in April, down from 44% in March. Now in January it was lower, it was even 26%. In February it was 34%. So we've had a pretty typical bell curve, almost perfect. We've gone from 26 up to 42 and back down to 30 in June. So the spring market bulge looked good for a while. And we're back down to 30. I think we feel like it ended a little early this year. I know. I feel like normally we would see a little more activity in May that would create more closings in June. We went down to 35 percent in May. We went down to 30 percent in June. So. Those contracts, just not a lot of them happened in order to keep up with the inventory. Now we may have had some good sales, but compared with the amount of inventory that's coming on the market, it's definitely, definitely a buyer's market. That's what we like to call it. Condos, 16%. So you have a 16 percent chance of selling your condo in the month of June. And we each have some condo listings. I definitely am feeling that impact. Yes. 84 percent of the condos. Did not go under contract. Pretty heavy. Yep. That's a big number of them that did not go under contract. So moving on to single family homes, let's look at a couple more statistics, just as it pertains to single family. And we do a lot of single family homes, but the closed sales were down 10%. The number of houses sold for cash down 20%, the dollar volume down 5. 6%. That's the total dollars. The. Median percent of original list price received was 96%. That's down 1.5% from June of 2023, so basically June of 2023. It was about a two and a half percent discount off of the list price. Original this year, June of 2024, it is down 4%, so about a 4% discount off that the median time to contract was up 57%. The median time to sale was up. 13 percent up to 60 days is the median time to get closed. So half of the houses are more than 60 days and half of the houses were less than 60 days. I think that's really poignant. We were talking about that before we started recording and I think it. It's definitely something that I am feeling on my own listing inventory. I currently have 12 listings. It's a lot. It is a lot. And they're all different price points, all different types of properties, like a pretty wide range from 3 million down to 250, 000. And so, and everything in between. Single family condos, different price points and the showing activity is certainly very slow, but I do agree that The listings that are the nicest and priced closest to the market are selling in the first week to two weeks, and then the rest of them are starting to linger. It almost feels like the ones that have been out there have been seen by the people who are buyers who are active in the market. They've seen them, they've said no, and they're waiting for the next ones to come out. That's a valid comment. Might be true. Yep. I have a new listing. It was a week or two old. We've had a ton of showings. It's a very nice house. 215 19th Avenue Northeast. That's correct. 215 19th Avenue Northeast. It's really is a fantastic house. A seller has done a ton of work on the house. Uh, so many updates in there really shows great. We had 15 groups come to the open house on Saturday. Um, and six or seven of them are real buyers. You know, we don't, we don't have an offer, so it's still available. One of the things I like about that home is the three bedrooms, three baths on the first level. That location is very hard to find. Yeah, I know, I know. And the primary suite's been completely redone. It's all new, has a new window that was added to the room. We have wind resistant thermal double pane windows throughout the house. You know, it's just a ton of stuff about the house. I mean, if you're interested, you're in that price point 1, 350, 000. 1, 000, then take a look at it. It's a great house and Julie can show it to you. Let's explain because you're on vacation, right? Cause I'm on vacation, which while Julie was in Italy, I was, she was on vacation and I had to get some stuff done, right? You did. It's a good trade. It is. It's a great trade. It's a great thing that we do for each other. So that's wonderful. So finishing up with the single family homes, pending sales down 7%. New listings up 11%. Pending inventory down 2. 2%. The active listings are up 103%. So from 1532 on the single family homes to 3114. Now we can finally talk about the month supply of inventory for single family homes in Pinellas County. It's up 111.1%. So we went from 1.8 in June of 2023 to 3.8 in June of 2024. That's now nearing four months of inventory in the single family home market. Well, it's funny'cause you mentioned, and we've talked about it before. That it's more of a buyer's market now. And I think once you start getting into the four and five months supply of inventory, I truly believe that's where the shift happens. Yeah. You, you gotta have a nice house. You have to be competitive in price. And I'll tell you, I mean, I also feel like that if you have a listing and you don't have a contract or And you're still looking to sell. You have to reduce the price because I think that buyers are actually looking to see that the seller is willing to reduce the price. Once they see the price come down, you might get another showing comes down. Again, you might get another showing. They're looking to see. If the buy, if the seller is motivated, and I think they judge that based on if there's been a price reduction. Well, that's interesting because an agent scheduled a showing at my listing today and texted me yesterday and actually said that they said, I see you've been on the market for six months, but have only had two very small price reductions and. I'm just curious if the seller's motivated. If they don't see a decent move, they assume that they're not motivated. I think we have a lot of listings on the market that are, that's the case. That they've not reduced the price? I think that they're just waiting things out. And I'm not sure that that's wise if the property's vacant. And you have a need to sell versus a desire to sell. Do you think that the upcoming presidential election could affect the market? I feel that every prior election year, it has had an impact on the sales activity. Definitively, people being concerned. And I think it doesn't matter what your political affiliation or your Views on things. I do think that people worry about a changeover of Administration and the direction that things are going seems to worry people. Yeah, I I you know I think what you see is because I was talking to my brother in Washington And he said that he had some buyers basically tell him look we're gonna I think we're gonna go on pause and see what happens in the election and I think it's it's I think it's more of an effect on buyers feeling like they should wait and see what happens before they pull the trigger. So I don't know how it affects sellers other than they just have to sit there and wait for buyers to be more serious or to find buyers that are willing to go ahead and they really need to buy something. I mean, you know, people who can wait may wait. I think they will. So anyway. We did talk about off Mike that, you know, maybe there's a time period in here and I'm talking to some sellers about the fact that if we, you know, say mid August, I mean, I'll, I always try to go on vacation late July, early August, because I feel like these are some of the slower months and some of the slower weeks and people are getting that one more vacation trip done. And so. They, you know, going to be starting school, taking their kids back to college. It's just a lot of activity during this time that doesn't include moving and doesn't include buying and selling. Now that's, you know, that's always curious because people ask me, isn't this a time when people want to get settled before school starts, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. Yeah, I think they make those decisions in May and April. Um, May and June is just, you know, they get out of school wherever they were before. If they're going to move and they're going to find a new place to live and start with a new school, I think they get that done at the beginning of the summer. And you know, I think you, that's poignant and true. You've talked about for private schools, the contracts are due. In January, February, aren't they? March, you know, he, if you haven't decided on a private institution by March, you're probably probably out of luck. Yeah. You need to be in line for that earlier. Uh, so that said, I just think that maybe, you know, mid August through mid October before you get into the real heat of the election. I just feel like you got a 60 day period here from mid August until mid October to get aggressive with trying to sell your house, if that's what you want to do. That's just my guess. What do you think? Uh, I'm tenuous. Okay. There's a lot of inventory and I think there are a lot of people waiting things out. I think buyers know that the market's taking a bit of a shift and I think they're hopeful that they can get a better deal later. I don't necessarily agree that's true, but I do think it is a mindset out there. Well, we'll see what happens when we explain it. Explore the statistics next month. That's a great wrap up. These are the statistics that we see this month. All we can do is read them and. See what we have out there. I mean, we've got, you know, probably 15 listings between us and that's, you know, I have probably three new listings that are going to be coming up in mid August to the beginning of September. So I'm excited about those. Be careful. Buyers are going to wait to make decisions on your other listings until they see what's coming. Then they're quite different, all of them, but that's, that's okay. So glad to bring information about what's changing in the MLS, what's happening with our local board and how that's tied to the National Association of Realtors Settlement. And these are the stats and hope this has been helpful. Please send us any questions that you have down below. You've got our email addresses. You can put them in the notes and we're always happy to take questions and answer things for people. And congratulations to Julia on your new brokerage. Thank you very much. And thanks for listening today. This is David Vann with the Real Property St. Pete podcast and Julie Jones. We hope you have a great week.