PLEASE NOTE we are now brokered by eXp Realty. Call or text Alisha Collins, eXp Realty at 307-247-1806 or email at alisha@casperpowerhouse.com We are excited to talk with you!
What is going to happen with the real estate market in Casper Wyoming and nationwide in 2022? We all have our hypothesis and lots of professional organizations have their thoughts too. Three things are for sure at the moment. 1. Inventory of homes is at an all time low! 2. Buyer demand is at an all time high. and 3. Mortgage rates are going to increase. What will all of this do to the home prices? Inventory is going to tell us the story. Will more people put their homes on the market this quarter. I would love to hear your thoughts!
There are so many headlines in real estate we could talk about right now from interest rates, that there’s not enough houses on the market. That buyer demand is high, that people are moving around more than ever. We could go on and on. So I’m just gonna take them one by one and break them down.
So right now we’re seeing more houses sell than ever before. More houses have sold the last year than before 2006. So when you hear that there’s not any houses to buy, that’s totally not true because we are still selling a record amount of homes. They’re just coming on the market and going off way quicker than they have been. So if you’re a buyer and you’re looking but you hear that there’s no houses to buy, that’s not true. We just have to hurry. We just have to go to that house you want to see immediately the moment it’s listed.
I listed a house last week at 1:45 PM. By 2:15, I had 10 showings and they just kept stacking up. By the time 24 hours passed, we were under contract. That doesn’t happen all the time, but it happened in this case. And we had already started our marketing and all of those things to help drive the people to that listing. But there were buyers that still hadn’t gotten into that house and there was time available. So we can’t wait 24 hours to go look at house. The moment you see it is the time you have to go look at it.
So now I wanna talk about interest rates, and there’s a lot of fear behind this, I think. Because people see as interest rates go up the housing in their minds they’re thinking that housing prices are gonna go down. And it’s going to cause all sorts of drama in real estate and that the market’s gonna crash. And that’s just not the case. So remember when our parents bought over 40 years ago, the interest rates were crazy high. They were 12% or 16%. We have seen the lowest rates we’ve ever seen in the last 10 years or whatever. The rates have been so low. So when we see these interest rate hikes, and the fed says, there’s gonna be, there’s places that say there’s two. And there’s places that say, there’s gonna be four. The different pundits that you talked to. So what we do know is that the feds are gonna increase the interest rates for sure. And it is going to decrease the amount of house you can buy as the interest rate goes up. You’ve heard me talk before about how on a $285,000 house between 3% and 4%, it’s a difference of $150. And so it does decrease the amount of house you can buy.
So you’ve heard me talk about this before, but I wanna touch on it again, the mortgage rate predictions and they’re all over the board. What different companies and different pundits are saying to interest rates will go up to. In quarter one, they are talking that they think it’s going to be about 3.3. It’s pretty much already there. So we are in quarter one, that was a definite good estimate. The average is all the way up to 3.7. So that we could see some differences in those payments. And there are, when in talking to lenders, they’re kind of bouncing around. And so if you’re real worried about the rate, you definitely need to shop around because different investors have different rates right now.
So let’s talk about the appreciation we’ve had over the last year. It’s probably the most appreciation we’ve seen in years and years. In Wyoming it was $30,000 of equity that homeowners gained over the year. Nationwide it was about actually over $56,000. So basically the U.S saw 31% nationwide. Now in what Casper, Wyoming, we saw about 1% a month and we’ve seen that continue. So the forecast for 2022, it’s interesting because again, all the pundits have something different to say. So the National Association of Realtors thinks that there’s only gonna be a 2.8 increase upon home prices. Whereas Fannie Mae thinks it’s going to be 7.4, but if you average all of the different pundits, as you can see on this graph, it’s about 5.2%. The interesting thing is last year, they thought we would only have an increase of 6.8%. And we actually, I just talked about what the increases were. So a lot of people think that these are totally understated and we’re going to see that increase. Again, that same 1% a month or more.
Now, the inventory is going to tell the tale. And you’re gonna hear about this a lot in the upcoming months as well, because if we have a surge in inventory, which the National Association of Realtors called around, did a study, and a lot of people said that they were going to make a move in the first quarter of the year, and others in the second quarter. So it’s really gonna be interesting to see how our inventory increases and how it all plays out for the market.
Last month, I also showed this buyer traffic index, and you can see that in Wyoming, the buyer demand is still really, really high. Now the seller traffic is very weak. So we’re on both ends of the scale. So you’ve probably heard other agents say along with myself, that now is the time to sell. If you are thinking of even downsizing or upsizing, there are homes that you can find that you will be thrilled with. You can still find your dream home. You just have to look a little bit, a little bit harder. And you can name some of the things you need when you’re selling your house. So if you have to find a home to go to, we can put that in the listing. If you need to rent it for two months, we can put that in the listing. So I think that the sellers are still in the driver’s seat. Again, the amount of listings that come on the market is going to help us tell the tale of what’s gonna happen for the coming months. So if you even just have an inkling you might sell, reach out to us, and we would love to do a market analysis free of charge for you and just talk to you about the goals. It might not make sense for you to sell your house. And it may. So those are the things that we have to look at and sit down and go through, and we are very low pressure. And we do not. We don’t want you to do something if it’s not the best for you.
One last thing that I wanted to talk about here is how you market your home. There are still a lot of people that do not want lots of people coming through their home. And that is okay. If you want to sell your house pre-market, it’s your house. So I don’t think that you should have anyone tell you what you don’t or have you do what you don’t want to do. There’s a lot of people looking for houses, so you could sell your house without having a lot of people going through it. You can put your house on the market and price it at the high end of the market. And it might take longer to sell because you priced it at the top range. You can price it where it should be. And it’s probably gonna get a lot of looks, and you will have an offer in the near future. The other way that some people are doing it is they’re pricing it under the market. And they’re getting a lot of people to write offers and kind of elicit a bidding war. And how we do this is completely up to you. We give you our advice and then you tell us what you would like to do. So I just wanted to stress that the importance of what you want is what we want.
So anyway, if you have any questions about any of the materials we went over or anything about buying or selling, or anything community related, we’d love to hear from you. Remember, we want you to love where you live.