Homes Not Selling
Why Are Homes Not Selling?
There are many reasons why a home may not sell, and there may be multiple factors that influence the speed with which a home sells or the purchase offers a seller receives.
It may be an inopportune time to attempt to sell your house in your local housing market, or there may be nationwide economic factors deflating the demand for homes. In recent years, rising interest rates have dissuaded some homeowners from selling and upgrading to a new home and made buying a home less attractive to first-time homeowners.
Multiple market and economic factors can create a confluence of hurdles that further handicaps the housing market as a whole. The variables may not always be pushing in the same direction. A lack of inventory may push prices up while higher interest rates push demand down at the same time.
In addition to market and economic-related variables are individual home characteristics. A home in an undesirable location may take a long time to sell because there are many other homes for sale in the general area that are in better locations. A home might have an old roof or HVAC system that requires replacement, while other homes for sale in the community have newer roofs or energy-efficient HVAC systems that are in better condition.
Do Interest Rates Matter?
Yes – although the perceptions and expectations of consumers have changed in recent years. Interest rates were already low prior to the 2008 recession, but they dropped even lower in the following years. Many current homeowners who bought in the five or 10 years after the recession locked in astonishingly low rates.
Today’s rates between seven and 10 percent may still be low compared to some 20th century rates, but they seem absurdly high to people who locked in (and don’t want to lose) once-in-a-lifetime low rates in the 2010s.
For context, the average 30-year fixed interest rate in February 2021 was 2.99 percent. The average was up to 7.95 percent by November 2023. While eight percent interest would seem incredibly low to a homebuyer in 1982 who was getting a 30-year fixed at nearly 17 percent, it seems painfully high to someone who bought a home in 2012 with a four percent rate.
Even small interest increases equate to tens of thousands of dollars in extra interest payments during the life of the loan. Informed shoppers may be weighing whether they really need a new home that badly or if they can wait a few years for rates to decrease.
Home Attributes That Affect Sales
There are a number of home characteristics that will influence the speed of sale. They include things homeowners can and can’t change – as well as some attributes it may not be in their interest to change.
For example, it might be better to accept a slower sale process if it means you don’t have to spend a lot of money replacing a roof. Yes – the old roof may make your home less attractive to home shoppers – but roof replacement does not typically have a 100-percent ROI, meaning you likely won’t see the entire cost of roof replacement reflected in increased equity at the time of sale.
Other things – like location, the condition of neighboring properties, the safety of the community or proximity to schools and other amenities – are entirely out of your control as a homeowner. This is where the marketing skills of a seller’s agent play a huge role in selling your home.
How Good Home Marketing Can Help Accelerate Your Home Sale
First impressions are important. Enhancing curb appeal, decluttering interiors and implementing even rudimentary staging may allow you to sell your home faster.
Many of those home enhancements are not particularly expensive. Things like home staging or decluttering can potentially be done for free with a little bit of research and hard work. Exterior modifications can be as simple as trimming the lawn, pulling weeds, pruning trees and shrubs and planting some flowers.
A skilled and experienced home seller can also help accelerate the sale of your home – especially if they leverage proven marketing strategies combined with a network of buyers’ agents and other real estate professionals.
We Have the Data to Back Up the Efficacy of Our Home Selling Approach
If you’re tired of your home being stuck on the market and garnering little to no interest from local home shoppers, 72SOLD can help. We utilize a proven effective marketing strategy designed to sell homes quickly for maximum price while imposing as little as possible on home sellers.
Our process generates interest fast and instills a sense of urgency in home shoppers. And we do it without real estate agent signs in your front yard or tedious and disruptive walkthroughs weekend after weekend.
