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Casper Real Estate Market Update December 2021. I am asked most places I go, “how is the Casper Real Estate market?” Should I sell my home? Should I buy a home? Seriously what do you think the Casper real estate market is going to do.
Every single place I go, people are asking me what is the real estate market doing? Is it a good time to sell? What if we buy too high? Maybe I should just stay in the house forever. I get everything. And so I thought that I would explain kind of what’s going on in the market now and some of the predictions about rates and about the prices, the appreciation that we’re gonna have for the next year, or is it going to be depreciation? You will have to watch to the end. Hi, I’m Alisha Collins with RE/MAX The Group and the Alisha Collins Real Estate Team. Thank you so much for watching us on YouTube. We love interacting with you, we love meeting you. And of course we love working with you and getting to know you. So our market is still moving at a very, very fast pace. There’s actually less than 100 houses on the market. It looks like there’s a little bit more on the market if you look online at some of the bigger websites, because there’s about 25 or 30 that are marked pending, continue to show. And most of those are because sellers want to get a backup offer just in case something happens with the first offer, because that can happen. I always tell my clients that it’s not a sure thing until we’re sitting at the closing table. So sometimes sellers just want that security of having that second offer. Now in saying that, a lot of buyers don’t love to be the second one, because they wanna keep looking. And actually we can put verbiage in the contract that protects you. So if you found another house, you wouldn’t have to wait to see if your second place offer would become first place. You could pull it and make another offer. But that’s why I get a lot of questions about how many houses are on the market. The other thing is there’s 186 homes under contract. So we are still selling houses. A lot of people have heard there’s not a lot of houses on the market so you must not be selling a lot of houses. We’re selling a lot of houses. We’ve actually sold more houses this year than we did at the same time last year. And we are going to end up quite a few higher than we were in 2020. You just have to quickly find the house. I think there’s a lot of houses selling off market as well. So that’s why it’s so important to work with a real estate agent because they know the houses that are coming on the market as well. Currently, there are about 186 under contract homes. This is about 100 less than there were about a month and a half ago. And that’s because it’s this time of year, it kind of slows down. I will tell you that buyers that are looking right now are super serious and there’s not as much competition because there are less homes on the market right now than there have been in the last few months. Now, if you are willing to put your house on the market during the holidays, you’re going to have that serious buyer looking and less competition. In the last week or so, the mortgage rate has gone up and the refinances have gone considerably down. So there’s a lot of talk about the Fed raising the interest rate. Most people don’t care about the mortgage interest rate unless you’re buying a house. And I think at times some buyers don’t understand the impact that the mortgage rate difference can make. It actually affects the amount of home, the purchase price, that you can make on a home. So I’m gonna show you the difference, or I’m gonna tell you the difference between the different rates if you were to buy the average sales price in Casper right now, which it’s about 285,000. So at 3%, the house payment would be $1,581 a month. At 3.5%, it would be $1,678 a month. And at 4% ,it would be $1,737. This is a difference of $150 a month. That is enough to significantly reduce your purchase price. The lender wants to make sure that you can easily make that house payment. So they’re going to get it each and every month. And so your debt to income ratio has to be in certain guidelines, depending on the type of loan you’re getting. So that is why you see a lot of headlines saying now’s the time to buy. So where does everybody think that these rates will go? It actually depends on who you talk to. Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Mortgage Bankers Association, and the National Association of Realtors all think that the rates are gonna go up, but they think they’re going to go up at different increments. This quarter, they actually all agreed. They thought they’d go to 3.2, 3.1 and that has happened. But going in to quarter one, two and three of next year, they’re kind of all over the place. They think that they could be 3.3 or 3.7. And so it’ll be interesting to see whose predictions were more right. The highest any of them think they could go is 3.7%, which is still less. It’s still a low mortgage rate. I remember buying a home in 2008 and my mortgage rate was 6.4%. And I still didn’t think it was that bad because when my parents bought a house, when I was young, it was at 12%. And so I think that we’re still obviously sitting in a great rate. I wanted to touch a little bit about the headlines. And I think that the day and age of we want somebody to click on all of our things, that the headlines are doing more to terrify people than to inform them unless they read the article. One of the headlines I recently read said foreclosure starts up 49%. So these are homes that the foreclosure process was started. And actually it was nowhere near where we even were in a more normal market in 2019. So it’s not that bad we just haven’t had… Foreclosure is horrible. It’s a horrible place to be in, but we haven’t had the foreclosures that we’ve had in the past right now. So they’re up because there’s more of them, but it’s not as much and not as awful as some of the headlines are saying it is. Another one was talking about how refinance was going down. And that was horrible and the rates were gonna go way up and actually home loan origination’s are supposed to go up 9% in 2022. So I think again, the headlines are trying to just terrify us. You have to go down and read the article, that is my advice. Another question I’m getting all the time is why are we seeing so many price reductions? And I think that some not all sellers are trying to just price their home for the stars and see if they get it. And that’s okay, you can have that strategy, totally fine. But the problem sometimes is, and I have many examples I could give you, is that when you start too high and then you consistently reduce, reduce, and you’re on the market way longer than the average sales prices, then you end up getting less in the long run than if you would’ve priced your home correctly to begin with. I caution sellers that you don’t wanna go way over the high end of the range of the market analysis. And it’s always good to talk to your agent, make sure that you understand the comps. Make sure you understand where you should price it, where you wanna price it. I do think it’s important where you wanna price the house, but you just don’t wanna be the person that’s reducing your house a ton. So that brings me to what do we think the housing market is going to do price wise for 2022. We all like to see appreciation in our homes, even I do. This graph is showing the predictions of what all the different companies say that it will increase. The average of all the predictions for the appreciation of 2022 is 5.1%. So you can still cash in on the appreciation. In the Casper area in the last year, we’ve seen increases from about 15 to 20%. Depending on the neighborhood and obviously condition of the home. The next two pictures of the United States, I thought were super interesting. It’s talking about how Wyoming has very, very weak seller activity. We are weakest in the country following a whole bunch of states. Now, the interesting thing is we have the second highest buyer demand. Buyers are out there and that is why if you’re thinking about selling your house, now is the time because there are serious buyers out there looking during the holiday. It is typical in the winter and during the holidays that the amount of homes on the market goes down, but there’s buyers looking right now. So this is the perfect time if you want to sell during the holidays. You can have your home sold if you’re looking to buy after the holidays, when the amount of homes on the market go up. And I love how homes look during the holidays, they’re just more warm. They’re more lit up and they’re more inviting to the buyer. We would love to help you with any of your real estate needs even if you just wanna chat about real estate, I’m your girl, I can talk for hours about real estate. Remember we want you to love where you live. See you soon.