Karen Brewer

This article captures the psychology of Darien Real Estate…

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article today on what is happening in the luxury real estate market. I happened to be discussing this just this noon in realtion to the Darien,Ct market.

I’ve even known of several Realtors in town who, when faced with reducing their own homes’ price,have been in denial and disbelief. That special”number” we all have in our heads ,occupies a very stubborn area of our brains . With time I guess we’ll all come around. We have to. 

Ive attached the full article below.

 

Real-estate agents are offering the same refrain: home sellers who are serious about selling have to price their homes properly (read: make the buyer think they’re getting a bargain).  Those who do, they say, are selling their home much faster.

A new report Friday shows that some sellers are getting that memo, albeit belatedly. Nearly one in four home sellers has dropped the asking price on their home, with an average price chop of 10% in July, according to real-estate Web site Trulia.com. More than one third of sellers reduced their asking prices in the top three cities: Jacksonville, Fla.; Portland, Ore.; and Milwaukee, Wisc.

The advice to offer buyers a “bargain” is particularly relevant for the luxury home market, where sellers have to be aggressive because inventories are piling up in many markets. Homes listed at $2 million and up offered an average 14% price reduction last month. (This story last week looked at how mid-to-upper end communities have braced themselves for further price declines.)

In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, buyers are getting more realistic about reducing prices for homes at the high-end, according to the Trulia report. One-third of homes listed for sale in Marin County, an affluent area north of San Francisco, had reduced their prices last month. In the East Bay’s Contra Costa County, some 36% of homes listed above $1 million had reduced their prices by July, compared to price reductions on 23% of homes below $1 million.

And there’s more evidence out this week for those who are in denial about the high-end market: Sales of single-family homes increased by 10% in July from the previous year in San Francisco’s East Bay, but sales of homes of at least $1 million were down 72% for the first seven months of the year compared to the same period last year, according to local Realtor data provided by Thomas Lawler, an independent housing economist.

For example, in San Ramon, an affluent middle-class community that has some of the state’s best public schools, just 36 homes above $1 million have sold this year, compared to 112 two years ago. But overall, San Ramon had a decent July, with 69 sales, up from 65 last year and 56 two years ago.

 

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2009 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Market Trends, Sellers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Email (will not be published) (required)

Website