Jean Cherni, Our Rock Star

Jean Cherni, a valued member of our Senior Services Department, is also a columnist for The New Haven Register.  We are always amazed, when we travel with her, how wide and how deep her ties are in the region; her readers span all generations and professions, despite the title "Senior Moments".  She's a wonderful writer, and seems to strike a chord with subscribers.

She certainly did this past weekend, when she wrote a column about buying a new car!  She talked about her experiences with various dealerships, including some where she felt minimized or overlooked.  It was a wonderful reminder for all of us in sales, that appearances can be deceiving, and that we don't always gauge correctly, when trying to determine the time line or the decision maker.  The other point that the column made, since she thought she was just looking, yet ended up driving home in a new car just hours after she walked into the final dealership, is that salespeople can sometimes influence the time line.  In fact, part of our challenge is to create a sense of urgency, or at least appetite for going forward, in buyers.  Jean's column showed us what can happen, both on the positive and the negative sides, when we either achieve or don't achieve those objectives.

The final part of this story is that we are handling Jean's fan calls, as well as ones from those who think they might have been targeted in her essay.  We can't get over the number of people who want to reach her, and tell her how they've been influenced by what she has written.  So, for some of our time this week, selling real estate has taken a back seat to answering readers of Jean's.  And we're happy to do so, as well as proud to have her on our team!

Snow in Connecticut

We all know what the big news this week is in Connecticut.  I never thought I would see more snow than in the Blizzard of '78, but I did this weekend!  For those of you who live elsewhere, or who providentially were out of town, here are some of my favorite storm images:

Judging the Market

One of the time-honored ways to judge the strength of the real estate market is by the months of supply available at any given time. In order to derive this number, we take the houses currently listed, and divide by the average number of sales per month, to get the number of months it would take to "use up" the current supply. During the recession, most parts of the country had a huge backlog of homes listed, including many places with more than a year's worth of homes for sale.

Last week, I was on a call with owners of real estate firms across the country, and recovery was in full swing.  The way they expressed this was in the decline of supply, making their areas more sellers' markets than buyers' markets, meaning that buyers no longer had the advantage of dozens (or hundreds) of homes to choose from, since supply had dropped in most places to a few months' worth at most.

In our market, we appear to be lagging, as I have said in recent posts.  Although our market has improved a great deal, we still have a greater supply than other places.  According to MLS figures, we have 7 months of homes under $300,000 available, 15 months of homes between $300,000 and 1 million available, and 31 months of homes over a million available.  This last number means that, if no new homes over a million went on the market from today forward, it would take over 2 and 1/2 years at the current rate of sales for the current inventory to dry up.

It's not quite as black and white as it may sound.  Many houses listed now may be overpriced, have something wrong with them, or may never sell.  Therefore, a seller putting on a home now should not think that his/her own home won't move for over 2 years.  He or she should, however, realize that aggressive pricing, especially in our area, is still important.