Tuesday, October 06, 2020

No housing market slowdown as real estate agents report a busy fall

 Realtors can usually count on their biggest season being spring, followed by summer. But nothing about 2020 has been normal, including home-buying patterns. With shut-down orders in the spring, summer became the new home-buying season, and homebuyers were still incredibly active in August.

Now, believe it or not, fall home-buying season is in full swing.

Traditionally, home-buying season slows down during the fall because families have settled in their new homes just in time for school to start. Now that school is mostly virtual, that calculation may be changing a bit.

“There’s a lot of homeschooling going on in this hybrid world, and it’s difficult,” Realtor Vesna Kanacki with Century 21 Full Service Realty in New City, New York, told HousingWire. Kanacki said that when it came to seasonal buying, “we’re still riding the wave with 2020.”

Kanacki’s market, like many others, remains competitive as buyers continue to experience bidding wars amid historically low housing inventory and an uptick in home prices.

“I think there is a lot of fear with the election coming up, that’s going to play a big factor of our spring market as well [and] depending on how everybody is comfortable with leadership going forward,” Kanacki said.

“But if the pandemic surges up again, I think we’re just going to get busier and busier here, because we are definitely located in the correct position, outside of New York City, where parents can still commute to work and children can have space needed for homeschooling and things like that,” Kanacki said.