Heads-Up! Sapphire’s Spring Selling Season is Here!

access_timeMarch 7, 2016personDorothy Swearingen

3-1-16-spring
Sapphire’s spring selling season is underway!

Okay—it’s understandable if that seems like a somewhat premature announcement, but it is verifiable from any number of sources. Never mind that this year, spring doesn’t officially arrive in Sapphire until March 20…but that’s only what astronomers say (and they can’t even decide whether Pluto is a planet). Meteorologists take issue with them, anyway. It’s always March 1 as far as meteorologists are concerned. But this year’s Godzilla El Niño has made everything they say subject to revision. And anyway, we’re talking about real estate—and when it comes to real estate, spring is here already!

Now, it may be true that if you look on one of those bank calendars you got in the mail last December, it’s likely to tell you that we’re weeks away from the change in seasons. And depending on what the latest weather seems to be doing, winter may seem to be hanging on for a while longer.

But nimble Sapphire real estate watchers know they can’t believe everything they read (or see happening outside in the garden). Cherry blossoms can’t call the shots when it comes to announcing Sapphire’s spring selling season, any more than tulips can. And that groundhog can stay in his den, for all the difference it makes to home sales.

This is fact: according to the real estate industry’s calendar, the spring selling season—in Sapphire and everywhere else across the nation—has definitely sprung!

Supporting evidence has flooded in from everywhere. For example:

⦁ Home Depot just announced it is hiring 80,000 workers for spring. These are the folks who work the cash registers [nowadays, shouldn’t they be called “plastic card registers?”] and help us wander up and down the aisles, looking for things we can’t describe exactly. Without them, spring wouldn’t be the same. With them, spring is clearly underway.
⦁ Internet real estate behemoth Zillow came out advising that everybody who is thinking about taking advantage of the spring selling season should start preparing their property “NOW”—and that was two weeks ago!
⦁ CNBC put it in real time: “Spring housing season kicks off with record short supply” was their headline. If CNBC says so, who could argue?
⦁ Baseball teams have hightailed it into camp. That should end the discussion…

These harbingers of the spring selling season should certainly mean more than robins hopping across lawns or yellow and pink Peeps appearing on grocery store shelves. And even for any overly cautious souls who decide to wait for the bank calendars’ say-so, taking full advantage of the spring selling season in Sapphire necessarily calls for advance preparation. A strong way to start is by giving me a call!

Sapphire Spring Real Estate Selling Season: it’s Sprung!

access_timeApril 17, 2015personDorothy Swearingen

4-8-spring When the first spring day comes along (as opposed to the first day of spring), a goodly proportion of Sapphire’s residents feel the annual pull toward the garden store aisles. Even those who’ve stoutly resisted ordering seeds, gardening tools, or any of the other back yard paraphernalia the catalogs kept hawking all winter can succumb to this particular Call of Nature.

Burpee, Scotts and Miracle-Gro shareholders can relax: spring has sprung.

The Sapphire spring real estate selling season starts stirring, too, pretty much in lockstep with the appearance of the tulips. Whether or not the tulips have succeeded in poking up out of the ground, it’s a cinch that by this time they will have made colorful appearances on store shelves everywhere, just like the Peeps and chocolate bunnies. Unlike the rest of the early spring’s trappings, though, the spring real estate phenomenon doesn’t disappear from sight once Easter Sunday is a memory. In fact, it picks up steam.

There are any number of explanations why spring real estate in Sapphire is always expected to ramp up. Part of the reason is the calendar. For families with children, if a move is going to involve a change in school districts, summer vacation is the least disruptive time of year for it to happen, so spring is the time to start house hunting. Part of the reason is due to the comparative difficulty of selling a home in wintertime: not only can foul weather make it harder to keep a home at its showy best, it also can throw a monkey wrench into property maintenance and the few cosmetic fixes that almost every home could use before it hits the Sapphire listings. The result is a certain amount of bottled-up inventory that bursts onto the scene all at once—and springtime is the single time of the year when that happens.

Then there is the automatic momentum effect. When you sell a Sapphire home, most families need to turn around and buy the next. The National Association of Realtors® tells us that the spring real estate selling season may actually be stronger than the numbers indicate, because many sales that really did begin “in season” don’t actually close until summer begins. Spring real estate as a phenomenon is “real” enough that you can’t blame them for lines like “Spring brings rain and flowers—and possibly extra green in the final sales price of your home.”

The spring real estate selling season is indeed underway, so if you are planning on listing your own Sapphire home anytime soon, now is a great time to give me a call. It’s the best way to take advantage of the traditional boom in prospective buyers!

Highlands Mortgage Down Payment Rules See Spring Turnaround

access_timeMarch 27, 2015personDorothy Swearingen

3-18-springmortgage The first day of spring! The vernal equinox! This year, March 20 is the red-letter day on Highlands’s real estate calendar. It’s the nominal kickoff to the traditionally rambunctious spring selling season—historically, the go-go time of year. It’s when more homes come on the market, more prospective buyers come out to see them, and more sales are launched than in any other season.

But this year, what happens three days later might well turn out to be nearly as noteworthy.

The 23rd may not mark an annual event, but it could become a second red-letter day for Highlands home buyers and sellers in 2015. If all goes according to plan, it’s the day when Freddie Mac joins Fannie Mae in easing the down payment requirements mortgage lenders observe.

This is part of a development that surfaced last fall when sharp-eyed Highlands residents first noticed some trial balloon announcements from the mortgage lending industry. The sources were insiders who leaked details of an agreement being hammered out between Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the lenders they underwrite. Fannie buys mortgage loans from the large commercial lenders, Freddie, smaller houses. Both of the mortgage behemoths are regulated by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. FHFA is the government overseer that lost most of its trusting good humor after it had to bail out Freddie and Fannie during the subprime mortgage fiasco (actually, it was we taxpayers who got the bill).

But last falls’ news leak indicated a reversal was in the wind. Borrowers with weaker credit might soon find it easier to land a mortgage, because Fannie and Freddie would resume making such loans less risky for lenders. That would be welcome news for Highlands home buyers and sellers alike. Tight Highlands mortgage lending rules had been part of the national reaction to the subprime mortgage mess, but the result had been predictable: a throttling back of the number of loans banks were willing to grant. Fewer mortgage loans meant that some sales simply wouldn’t take place. In some cases, it was downright irritating.

That’s why, for some Highlands mortgage applicants, March 23rd could mark the resumption of renewed home owning possibilities. It’s the kickoff date for a program Freddie Mac calls “Home Possible”—and it means that Fannie will be joined in offering “flexible credit terms and low down payment options”…options that can include down payments as low as 3%. Freddie’s website calls the result “more flexibility for maximum financing.”

With the kickoff of the spring selling season, Freddie’s “Home Possible” couldn’t have come at a better time (some humor-minded real estate professionals had begun to think of Freddie’s previous programs as “Home Impossible”). Even just the expected publicity should encourage some formerly gun-shy prospective Highlands mortgage applicants to resume their quest for a home to call their own.

If you could be one of them—or a homeowner preparing to list for the spring season—I hope you will give me a call. Your timing couldn’t be better!