Let’s talk about housing! Are we all tired of hearing that? Are we tired of hearing how we’re short of listings and how we have more buyers than we have listings? And every time you listen to a news report or read a news report, housing is always being mentioned. Well…it is a huge driver of our economy. The housing market is a small ripple effect. Once we sell one house, the many, many, many people that we put to work is huge, especially new construction when you think about it that way.
New construction puts so many people to work. But just buying a pre-owned home, the number of people that are put to work, starting with lenders, and title companies, and appraisers, and surveyors, the taxing authority. So, many people touch that file and make a living off of it. Think about after… And from selling a home, the things you do to get ready to sell a home. The money that you spend to get it painted, or carpet, or whatever else you do to get a home sold. The moving companies to get both a buyer and a seller to and from their homes. Those little things that you go buy after you’ve bought a home to make a house a home, those stores that you frequent. Again, the ripple effect of one home sale is huge, therefore, an economic driver.
When you hear those things, that’s why. And that’s why it’s alarming to all of us when we see that the inventory of homes for sale is shrinking. Not just a little bit, dramatically. The month of August, we were down 45% in the number of listings this time last year. That’s huge. That’s not a small thing. If we don’t free up houses to sell, then we don’t have homes for our buyers to buy. And that just, again, just starts a whole cycle that none of us want to see. When you get tired of hearing it over and over and over again, at least now you understand the why, the why it concerns us all that we don’t have enough houses to sell, that we have more buyers out there than we have sellers, and what a huge economy driven item housing is for us. All of those things come into play, and hopefully it’ll give you a little more insight as to the why.