21 ms·

In January, there were more real-estate agents than homes for sale in the U.S.

270 points by undefined1 6y ago

neartheplain 6y ago
This matches my anecdotal experience. Last week my parents, who live outside a big US city, got a letter out of the blue from a buyer’s agent asking if they’d want to sell their home. They don’t; it wasn’t and isn’t listed for sale. They’ve lived in the home for decades, and never before received this type of solicitation. I see it as a marker of a tapped-out housing market.
- supercanuck 6y ago
  This has been relatively common for me in Southern California during the 8 years I’ve owned a home.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    I love the various attached stories about people’s personal lives and tribulations, almost all of which I assume are fake.
- nickthegreek 6y ago
  I live in an upcoming area in Columbus, Ohio and get calls for cash offers of my home every week for a year now. It is infuriating.
  - Scoundreller 6y ago
    But this $149 super-selective top-secrets road-to-wealth program told me I need to cold-call and ask, no, demand! what I need to acquire wealth.
- rwmj 6y ago
  When I lived in London this happened regularly. Even now we live out in the countryside we get these unsolicited letters from time to time.
- jandrese 6y ago
  I get those letters every other day now. It's pure spray and pray from agents.
- triceratops 6y ago
  I get calls from telemarketers asking me. I don't even own a house.
- SoylentYellow 6y ago
  A lot of these letters are also from real estate "investors". Their tactic is to go after properties before they are on the market and use the seller's lack of pricing information to score a substantial discount.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    Yeah, you can thank the modern versions of Carlton Sheets peddling their "courses" on BiggerPockets, YouTube, etc. It's the same as it ever was: desperate people wanting desperately to get rich and going after anything that seems like it might help.
- nostromo 6y ago
  This is the wrong conclusion. This is a very common scam. People will reach out to people not selling their house and offer them below-market prices. A small number of people (often elderly) have no idea how much their home is actually worth and will sell it for a lowball offer because the price seems so high to them.
- atwebb 6y ago
  That's been fairly common for decades, some are genuinely looking for a specific neighborhood/house for a client. Some are looking for a deal, some are looking to find sellers to represent. You'll also see realtors blanket mail recent sales in the area, implying that it is a good market and what you might be able to get. Some of the tactics get very greedy/nasty, especially when someone, who was an owner of desirable property, passes.
- jccalhoun 6y ago
  My parents live in rural Indiana and get people asking if they want to sell or if they want to sell part of their land once every couple of years. Two years ago my cousin sold his house even though it wasn't up for sale(in a small town in Indiana) because someone liked it so much that they kept offering them more and more money.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  I get a few of those every month for years. It's not a sign of much. I hang out in real estate investing circles and this is purely marketing. The majority of times, they're looking for people who have a lot of equity in the house and are in trouble financially - so they'll sell at a discount. Maybe only 1% of people who get such mailings fall in this category, but they are the ones who will pick up the phone and call, so the money to mail was well spent (if the mailer did some market analysis).
- matwood 6y ago
  I get those letters all the time, and have lived in my house for quite awhile. Thing is though, I consider my house always for sale for the right price. One RE agent I know came close to my price, but her buyers were a bit crazy and ended up moving to a completely different state.
- JeremyNT 6y ago
  This is essentially a scam and you'll find it anywhere that housing prices are on the rise. These people are looking for older / less clued in owners who are easily confused and in need of cash. They can trick these people into selling well below market rate by going directly to them. Sadly it works. If you have an older relative who may be in cognitive decline try to make them aware of this trick!
  - dlp211 6y ago
    This isn't always a scam. I'm not saying one way or another what this was, but I have been solicited for a purchase on my home as well and I'm not old and certainly not in cognitive decline.
  - masonic 6y ago
    This is essentially a scam Not always. I just got a hand-written letter from a losing bidder on another home in our small complex that sold last month. You learn to differentiate the home seekers from the property flippers.
paxys 6y ago
Makes sense when a large chunk of the country is unemployed and you can get a real estate license online relatively painlessly. Filter down to agents who actually have a client and/or have bought or sold a single home and the number will be very different.
irrational 6y ago
Where we live the market is especially tight. We ended up selling our home by saying we would not sell if you have a realtor and this is the price you will pay and you will not have an appraisal contingency. The very first people to come and look at it bought it. The market is very much a seller's market right now. We also purchased a new home without having a realtor involved. These days, the Internet makes things so easy that there isn't a need for a realtor like there used to be.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I don't have the data but I'd guess a few things: - It's probably very uneven across housing types and locations - If people are moving from apartments to houses, they're net taking homes for purchase off the market - Anecdotally, I see people moving into larger homes to have more room - I expect you end up with some overlap when people are in the process of moving
- chrisco255 6y ago
  People always say this in a bull market. Then a downturn happens and it takes 6 months of active work and marketing to sell.
  - Xenograph 6y ago
    Honest question: what would cause a downturn in the housing market? People will always need/want houses, right?
    - starik36 6y ago
      Judging by past downturns, it's usually a pricing bubble accompanied by an economic calamity of some sort.
    - yellowbeard 6y ago
      Lack of demand (population decline), or increase in supply.
    - krustymeathead 6y ago
kevin42 6y ago
I wonder how much of this is related to the eviction moratorium. Anecdotally, my wife has a house that had a tenant in it. She was planning on selling it last year, but she had a hard time getting the tenant out. His lease had expired, and he also hadn't paid rent. He thought that the moratorium should cover him even though his lease had expired for several months. She only recently got him to move out, and she put the house up for sale right away. I bet there are more sellers than her in this situation. I suspect that once the moratorium is up, there will be a lot of landlords looking to sell. They've been not getting rent for a long time, and they may have to sell in order to get out of the hole they're in. Many still have mortgages, but they will have a hard time collecting a year worth of rent. But the bank won't have the same problem foreclosing.
- ianai 6y ago
  Pretty sure she can still sue civically for back rent. Wish the renter had at least tried to pay some rent during that time out of good faith. I am almost certain this will be a trend.
  - commandlinefan 6y ago
    Winning a suit is one thing - collecting damages is something else.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      The civil courts are pretty useless if your adversary has no funds and nothing to lose.
      - setgree 6y ago
        Everyone has a credit score that can go down. (Is there a floor?) A record of a rent lawsuit is no good for anyone. I often wonder how people on the verge of eviction think about this kind of thing — whether it is salient or even understandable.
theferalrobot 6y ago
Slightly off topic but... as someone that is moving out of the city and even a few states over does anyone have any advice on home buying? Would it be better to buy now or rent for a bit and then buy? Is that like asking what stocks to invest in or is it more predictable than that? I have zero experience with this sort of thing.
- ghaff 6y ago
  A few questions I would ask: - Do you have confidence that you'll be able to continue working from wherever you move to? - Are you looking at a house or a condo? (It's generally easier to rent an apartment than a house.) - What are your motivations to buy? There's plenty out there on the financial side. Some of it is even reasonably accurate. However, IMO you should probably be thinking more about whether you want stability and the ability to customize a home or are you wanting to maintain a degree of flexibility if you decide to move somewhere else in a few years? - Do you know the area(s) you're thinking of moving to? If not, it may make sense to rent for a while while you decide if that's where you really want to be.
  - jpm_sd 6y ago
    It's enough of a seller's market that OP will almost certainly have to rent at/near their destination while house hunting. Last time I moved, it was 6 months of rental while going to open houses every weekend.
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    Even with regards to maintaining a degree of flexibility, it might be worth considering if you actually do lose money on closing costs + taxes + value loss than you will on rent, even for a short term. Half or more of every mortgage payment is invested in an asset, 0% of every rent payment is.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      On the other hand you're foregoing any further returns on the money you take out of savings to pay the down payment and closing costs. It's definitely not as simple as rent is throwing money away compared to buying.
osrec 6y ago
I find it strange that for one of the largest transactions most people will ever make, they choose to use an advisor with little or no real education in the subject, with whom they have a relationship that's steeped in moral hazard.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  what choice do they have, though?
  - qeternity 6y ago
    Ah, the hallmark of a functional marketplace.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      In the US, no one is forcing anyone to use a real estate agent.
      - Domenic_S 6y ago
        Before the zillow/redfin days the only way to see houses for sale was to physically observe the for sale sign or look in the newspaper. The NAR keeps a tight fist around the MLS where for-sale homes appear. Even with all the online information there's plenty of "secret" info in the Realtors-Only MLS notes. The information asymmetry is absolutely bonkers in real estate.
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        I fully support more transparency and accessibility of information. I think governments should make the details of real estate transactions easily searchable, and most do in the US! But if a group of people want to organize and maintain that info in a certain way, and have their notes, and get paid for doing that, is that not their right?
Scoundreller 6y ago
I think this metric is irrelevant without looking at time-on-market. Each agent may still sell a dozen a year. There are also more stock brokers than stocks, but we slice them up and shuffle them around a lot.
Ericson2314 6y ago
The land industry is total scum. They make us all poorer with sprawl, they are the industry with the worst history of systemic racism, they're more deeply invested in the status quo than the car industry which could retool a few factories to crank out traincars and e bikes.
klmadfejno 6y ago
I can't read the full article, but I did just buy a house in the greater boston area. The housing market is very tight now. Very small number of houses available relative to the historical seasonal norm. Part of that was driven by a very hot market in the previous months which are normally empty. The number of buyers is very very high. Most properties are going as soon as they hit the market, for a fair chunk over list.
Robotbeat 6y ago
It makes sense because houses don’t stay on the market very long. What matters for average real estate agent wages is average price of real estate time number of houses that sell per month. If the number of houses on the market is small because they sell immediately, that’s it necessarily a problem for them.
gullywhumper 6y ago
The housing market is bonkers in Minneapolis. This Saturday we put an offer in on home that went on the market Thursday. There were 31 other offers. We offered 20% over asking, but didn't get it. That was our fourth unsuccessful offer so far. Three of the winners for the other offers supposedly had both appraisal gaps and waived inspections.
- McRask 6y ago
  It's almost that bad in suburban New Jersey. Not so bad as waiving inspections necessarily but covering appraisal gaps is pretty much required because of how hot it is. Same for 10-20% over ask on the offers.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    When we were buying about 8 years ago in the Bay area, we probably wrote 50 offers, all above asking, and finally got one home. It was a total nightmare as a buyer. One home got 40 written offers, according to the listing agent, and sold for 2X its asking price--all cash, no contingencies.
    - jb775 6y ago
      That's insane they got 2X. I'm sure if some of their neighbors knew that, they'd consider selling themselves.
      - asdff 6y ago
        Sell, then what? Another mortgage if they want to live in the area, or uprooting entirely. That 2 million dollar bay area house might have been a 20k house among 10-40k houses in the 1970s; today it's a 2 million dollar house among 2-10 million dollar houses, so at best you'd be doing a lateral move or downsizing into something grossly overpriced, or line up to become one of the 40 people trying to throw a cash offer somewhere in the stratosphere above list on some midwestern home. It's a zero sum game unless you upzone and build more housing to meet the demand, because the population of this country has only gone up.
11thEarlOfMar 6y ago
I'm not sure this is news? In December 2019, there were about 1.4 million existing homes for sale. [0] That same month, there were about 2,000,000 active real estate agents [1] [0] https://www.nar.realtor/blogs/economists-outlook/existing-home-sales-trends-2009-2019 https://www.nar.realtor/blogs/economists-outlook/existing-ho... [1] https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/quick-real-estate-statistics https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/quick-real-e...
- masonic 6y ago
  This fact, and the OP title, are confusing the snapshot of minimum inventory with "homes for sale". Since there were over 5.4 million sales in 2019, there were way more listings during the year than agents.
sschueller 6y ago
Is that wording correct? It sounds like actual real estate agents are for sale.
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  It's a sign of a frothy housing market when there gets to be a bubble in buying real estate agents. But be careful, in California if you even just rent someone your real estate agent for more than 30 days, it becomes very hard to get your real estate agent back.
ncmncm 6y ago
If they were for sale, they weren't homes. They were houses. Seriously. It creeps me out that RE people call things nobody has even lived in "homes". Places somebody else lived in are even worse. How do they know it was a home? It might have been crack house. "Crack home"? Anyway what you can buy is just the house part. It becomes home after you make it that, if you succeed. The idea that you can buy a home emphasizes the worst of American capitalism.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  I think for many people 'house' and 'home' and interchangeable and the connotations you see in the language aren't what's intended.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    Obviously that is what Real Estate agents have lately got people used to. But that is recent. There is intrinsic value in different words having different meanings. There are reasons why we had two words. Those reasons were inconvenient to RE agents, so they fixed it. Everybody downvoting me has swallowed it whole.
mkoubaa 6y ago
I seriously thought about getting a license to save money when I was buying my first house
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
The title seems misleading to me. Let me explain. 1) Average homes sold per real estate agent, per year: 2.8 [0] It means that on average, on a given month, only 1/2.8 = 35.7% of active real estate agents will be listing a home for sale. 2) Homes for sale per year: 6,220,000 [1], however it seems that January 2021 saw that number go to an annualized of 6.69M. [2] 3) To say that in January there were "more real estate agents than homes for sale", would mean that there are at least 6.69M / 2.8 = 2,389,000 active real estate agents in the US. I don't have a WSJ membership, and therefore can't read in the article what this number is. I can only try to guess that it's either the total number of real estate agents (2M in 2019), or realtors (1.3M in 2019) [3]. The title seems clickbaity. The essence, I guess, should be that realtors are competing against each other more than before? [0]: https://www.rtrsells.com/can-you-tell-how-many-homes-a-realtor-has-sold/ https://www.rtrsells.com/can-you-tell-how-many-homes-a-realt... [1]: https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/ehs-02-2021-summary-2021-03-22.pdf https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/ehs-02... [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-home-sales-edged-higher-in-january-amid-tight-inventory-11613747681 https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-home-sales-edged-higher-in-... [3]: https://www.homelight.com/blog/how-many-realtors-in-the-us/ https://www.homelight.com/blog/how-many-realtors-in-the-us/
- allcentury 6y ago
  Averages are not a good metric for this field. NAR itself uses median to make it look more balanced than it is [1], but in reality - 80% of the transactions goes to 20% of the agents. [1]: https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/quick-real-estate-statistics https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/quick-real-e...
taurath 6y ago
Why don't we just simply tell people straight up "If you don't have capital at this moment, you most likely never will" because that is the way things seem to be going.
lurquer 6y ago
Can’t read without subscription. But, I was wondering... Is this one of those click-bait article titles that should read: “In January [, similarly to the last 120 months,] there were more real-estate agents than homes for sale in the U.S.” Note: I’m referring to the sub-heading of the actual article... not implying OP put the wrong title.
jb775 6y ago
Wouldn't the natural solution to this be real-estate agents accepting lower commissions? Or transition to a non-commissioned pay rate? RE agents historically provided massive value because they were the market-makers. Nowadays, they are glorified paper pushers and it's baffling they're still demanding a percentage of a massive purchase.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  I used to sell real estate during the last bull cycle of '03-'07. People got the same attitude towards agents then, when the supply is so low and buyers are high, it's relatively easy to sell on your own. But during a bull market being a buyer's agent is more work. People have full time jobs and can't spend all their time researching or managing multiple offers. Buyer's agents put in dozens to hundreds of hours of work per client and get no guarantee of a return (if your client goes to another agent, you have no recourse and you get no income from that transaction). If you're getting 20 offers on your house, then 19 of those buyers are gonna be disappointed and gonna have to regroup and find something else. During a bear market, the opposite is true. Being a listing agent now takes better marketing, networking, presentation and sales skills and it is easier to be a buyer's agent. At any rate, there are countless numbers of obstacles that can cause a deal to fall through, from financing, inspections, FHA approvals, title issues, personal issues, etc that skilled agents can much more easily navigate and close a deal much more reliably. For me, no two deals were the same, and it was always interesting to try to thread the needle when it at first seemed hopeless.
hellbannedguy 6y ago
We need more Brokers in California. For years, a Broker’s license could be obtained by 8 courses, An easy test, and a four year degree. The Realator's Lobby decided their were too many Brokers. They introduced a bill (A bill requiring years of training under a broker in order to get the license) to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold said he didn’t see the need, and didn’t want to stifle competition. Governor Brown signed the bill though. (I stopped judging a politician by there party that day. Both sides take a lot of money.) I would love to see the entire real estate industry decimated. We have given a very few of these people so much money for what? In the mean time, I would like to see more Brokers. More competition for the popular cheerleaders, handholding, and Omission and error insurance? Sorry about the tone. Realator’s have always irritated me, and most people pick them out by a personality contest?
- austhrow743 6y ago
  >(I stopped judging a politician by there party that day. Both sides take a lot of money.) Can you expand on that? Republican doesn't want regulation, Democrat does, doesn't sound like a party defying happening.
- gamblor956 6y ago
  None of what you said is true. I have multiple friends that became brokers on the last year or two, and none of them trained under a broker. They simply took classes and passed a test.
xibalba 6y ago
An large influx of non-professionals is often a signal of a late stage bubble.
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  The only reason I wouldn't 100% agree with you, is that I recall thinking this about real estate agents several times in the last 13 years, and it hasn't apparently ever been true yet.
dillondoyle 6y ago
Why haven't real estate agent fee %s gone down then?
TwoNineFive 6y ago
Imagine if there were more used car sales salespeople than there were used cars. That's what a "realtor" is BTW: A used house salesman.
- perl4ever 6y ago
  I have a vague impression that there is generally a low barrier to calling yourself a salesperson. Like, if you are going to make your money on commission, there's no need for gatekeeping as is expected for a salaried job. When I've been unemployed, I've gotten solicitations that are crafted to sound like a "real" job, but are actually sales, and it doesn't appear they care about qualifications at all. I assume you sell stuff or you don't. And real estate agents I've met are very...variable.
twobitshifter 6y ago
House prices are usually tied to income levels by 3x income. This is about what people can afford if it drive past this you have a bubble. https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... Look at where we are now. Housing is a decent hedge against inflation but not the great investment make it out to be unless you’re a landlord. The truth is there is a lot of upkeep and if housing prices rise you will have to pay the same as your sale when you sell. It’s great if you’re downsizing, or moving from an expensive city to a rural spot, but if you’re just changing locales you have to eat the transaction cost.
- blackrock 6y ago
  Then we are clearly in a bubble. Housing prices are now 4x or 5x of a husband/wife dual income.

270 points by undefined1 6y ago

This matches my anecdotal experience. Last week my parents, who live outside a big US city, got a letter out of the blue from a buyer’s agent asking if they’d want to sell their home. They don’t; it wasn’t and isn’t listed for sale. They’ve lived in the home for decades, and never before received this type of solicitation. I see it as a marker of a tapped-out housing market.

supercanuck 6y ago
This has been relatively common for me in Southern California during the 8 years I’ve owned a home.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I love the various attached stories about people’s personal lives and tribulations, almost all of which I assume are fake.
nickthegreek 6y ago
I live in an upcoming area in Columbus, Ohio and get calls for cash offers of my home every week for a year now. It is infuriating.
- Scoundreller 6y ago
  But this $149 super-selective top-secrets road-to-wealth program told me I need to cold-call and ask, no, demand! what I need to acquire wealth.
rwmj 6y ago
When I lived in London this happened regularly. Even now we live out in the countryside we get these unsolicited letters from time to time.
jandrese 6y ago
I get those letters every other day now. It's pure spray and pray from agents.
triceratops 6y ago
I get calls from telemarketers asking me. I don't even own a house.
SoylentYellow 6y ago
A lot of these letters are also from real estate "investors". Their tactic is to go after properties before they are on the market and use the seller's lack of pricing information to score a substantial discount.
- sidlls 6y ago
  Yeah, you can thank the modern versions of Carlton Sheets peddling their "courses" on BiggerPockets, YouTube, etc. It's the same as it ever was: desperate people wanting desperately to get rich and going after anything that seems like it might help.
nostromo 6y ago
This is the wrong conclusion. This is a very common scam. People will reach out to people not selling their house and offer them below-market prices. A small number of people (often elderly) have no idea how much their home is actually worth and will sell it for a lowball offer because the price seems so high to them.
atwebb 6y ago
That's been fairly common for decades, some are genuinely looking for a specific neighborhood/house for a client. Some are looking for a deal, some are looking to find sellers to represent. You'll also see realtors blanket mail recent sales in the area, implying that it is a good market and what you might be able to get. Some of the tactics get very greedy/nasty, especially when someone, who was an owner of desirable property, passes.
jccalhoun 6y ago
My parents live in rural Indiana and get people asking if they want to sell or if they want to sell part of their land once every couple of years. Two years ago my cousin sold his house even though it wasn't up for sale(in a small town in Indiana) because someone liked it so much that they kept offering them more and more money.
BeetleB 6y ago
I get a few of those every month for years. It's not a sign of much. I hang out in real estate investing circles and this is purely marketing. The majority of times, they're looking for people who have a lot of equity in the house and are in trouble financially - so they'll sell at a discount. Maybe only 1% of people who get such mailings fall in this category, but they are the ones who will pick up the phone and call, so the money to mail was well spent (if the mailer did some market analysis).
matwood 6y ago
I get those letters all the time, and have lived in my house for quite awhile. Thing is though, I consider my house always for sale for the right price. One RE agent I know came close to my price, but her buyers were a bit crazy and ended up moving to a completely different state.
JeremyNT 6y ago
This is essentially a scam and you'll find it anywhere that housing prices are on the rise. These people are looking for older / less clued in owners who are easily confused and in need of cash. They can trick these people into selling well below market rate by going directly to them. Sadly it works. If you have an older relative who may be in cognitive decline try to make them aware of this trick!
- dlp211 6y ago
  This isn't always a scam. I'm not saying one way or another what this was, but I have been solicited for a purchase on my home as well and I'm not old and certainly not in cognitive decline.
- masonic 6y ago
  This is essentially a scam Not always. I just got a hand-written letter from a losing bidder on another home in our small complex that sold last month. You learn to differentiate the home seekers from the property flippers.

paxys 6y ago

Makes sense when a large chunk of the country is unemployed and you can get a real estate license online relatively painlessly. Filter down to agents who actually have a client and/or have bought or sold a single home and the number will be very different.

irrational 6y ago

Where we live the market is especially tight. We ended up selling our home by saying we would not sell if you have a realtor and this is the price you will pay and you will not have an appraisal contingency. The very first people to come and look at it bought it. The market is very much a seller's market right now. We also purchased a new home without having a realtor involved. These days, the Internet makes things so easy that there isn't a need for a realtor like there used to be.

ghaff 6y ago
I don't have the data but I'd guess a few things: - It's probably very uneven across housing types and locations - If people are moving from apartments to houses, they're net taking homes for purchase off the market - Anecdotally, I see people moving into larger homes to have more room - I expect you end up with some overlap when people are in the process of moving
chrisco255 6y ago
People always say this in a bull market. Then a downturn happens and it takes 6 months of active work and marketing to sell.
- Xenograph 6y ago
  Honest question: what would cause a downturn in the housing market? People will always need/want houses, right?
  - starik36 6y ago
    Judging by past downturns, it's usually a pricing bubble accompanied by an economic calamity of some sort.
  - yellowbeard 6y ago
    Lack of demand (population decline), or increase in supply.
  - krustymeathead 6y ago

kevin42 6y ago

I wonder how much of this is related to the eviction moratorium. Anecdotally, my wife has a house that had a tenant in it. She was planning on selling it last year, but she had a hard time getting the tenant out. His lease had expired, and he also hadn't paid rent. He thought that the moratorium should cover him even though his lease had expired for several months. She only recently got him to move out, and she put the house up for sale right away. I bet there are more sellers than her in this situation. I suspect that once the moratorium is up, there will be a lot of landlords looking to sell. They've been not getting rent for a long time, and they may have to sell in order to get out of the hole they're in. Many still have mortgages, but they will have a hard time collecting a year worth of rent. But the bank won't have the same problem foreclosing.

ianai 6y ago
Pretty sure she can still sue civically for back rent. Wish the renter had at least tried to pay some rent during that time out of good faith. I am almost certain this will be a trend.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  Winning a suit is one thing - collecting damages is something else.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    The civil courts are pretty useless if your adversary has no funds and nothing to lose.
    - setgree 6y ago
      Everyone has a credit score that can go down. (Is there a floor?) A record of a rent lawsuit is no good for anyone. I often wonder how people on the verge of eviction think about this kind of thing — whether it is salient or even understandable.

theferalrobot 6y ago

Slightly off topic but... as someone that is moving out of the city and even a few states over does anyone have any advice on home buying? Would it be better to buy now or rent for a bit and then buy? Is that like asking what stocks to invest in or is it more predictable than that? I have zero experience with this sort of thing.

ghaff 6y ago
A few questions I would ask: - Do you have confidence that you'll be able to continue working from wherever you move to? - Are you looking at a house or a condo? (It's generally easier to rent an apartment than a house.) - What are your motivations to buy? There's plenty out there on the financial side. Some of it is even reasonably accurate. However, IMO you should probably be thinking more about whether you want stability and the ability to customize a home or are you wanting to maintain a degree of flexibility if you decide to move somewhere else in a few years? - Do you know the area(s) you're thinking of moving to? If not, it may make sense to rent for a while while you decide if that's where you really want to be.
- jpm_sd 6y ago
  It's enough of a seller's market that OP will almost certainly have to rent at/near their destination while house hunting. Last time I moved, it was 6 months of rental while going to open houses every weekend.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Even with regards to maintaining a degree of flexibility, it might be worth considering if you actually do lose money on closing costs + taxes + value loss than you will on rent, even for a short term. Half or more of every mortgage payment is invested in an asset, 0% of every rent payment is.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    On the other hand you're foregoing any further returns on the money you take out of savings to pay the down payment and closing costs. It's definitely not as simple as rent is throwing money away compared to buying.

osrec 6y ago

I find it strange that for one of the largest transactions most people will ever make, they choose to use an advisor with little or no real education in the subject, with whom they have a relationship that's steeped in moral hazard.

commandlinefan 6y ago
what choice do they have, though?
- qeternity 6y ago
  Ah, the hallmark of a functional marketplace.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    In the US, no one is forcing anyone to use a real estate agent.
    - Domenic_S 6y ago
      Before the zillow/redfin days the only way to see houses for sale was to physically observe the for sale sign or look in the newspaper. The NAR keeps a tight fist around the MLS where for-sale homes appear. Even with all the online information there's plenty of "secret" info in the Realtors-Only MLS notes. The information asymmetry is absolutely bonkers in real estate.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        I fully support more transparency and accessibility of information. I think governments should make the details of real estate transactions easily searchable, and most do in the US! But if a group of people want to organize and maintain that info in a certain way, and have their notes, and get paid for doing that, is that not their right?

Scoundreller 6y ago

I think this metric is irrelevant without looking at time-on-market. Each agent may still sell a dozen a year. There are also more stock brokers than stocks, but we slice them up and shuffle them around a lot.

Ericson2314 6y ago

The land industry is total scum. They make us all poorer with sprawl, they are the industry with the worst history of systemic racism, they're more deeply invested in the status quo than the car industry which could retool a few factories to crank out traincars and e bikes.

klmadfejno 6y ago

I can't read the full article, but I did just buy a house in the greater boston area. The housing market is very tight now. Very small number of houses available relative to the historical seasonal norm. Part of that was driven by a very hot market in the previous months which are normally empty. The number of buyers is very very high. Most properties are going as soon as they hit the market, for a fair chunk over list.

Robotbeat 6y ago

It makes sense because houses don’t stay on the market very long. What matters for average real estate agent wages is average price of real estate time number of houses that sell per month. If the number of houses on the market is small because they sell immediately, that’s it necessarily a problem for them.

gullywhumper 6y ago

The housing market is bonkers in Minneapolis. This Saturday we put an offer in on home that went on the market Thursday. There were 31 other offers. We offered 20% over asking, but didn't get it. That was our fourth unsuccessful offer so far. Three of the winners for the other offers supposedly had both appraisal gaps and waived inspections.

McRask 6y ago
It's almost that bad in suburban New Jersey. Not so bad as waiving inspections necessarily but covering appraisal gaps is pretty much required because of how hot it is. Same for 10-20% over ask on the offers.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  When we were buying about 8 years ago in the Bay area, we probably wrote 50 offers, all above asking, and finally got one home. It was a total nightmare as a buyer. One home got 40 written offers, according to the listing agent, and sold for 2X its asking price--all cash, no contingencies.
  - jb775 6y ago
    That's insane they got 2X. I'm sure if some of their neighbors knew that, they'd consider selling themselves.
    - asdff 6y ago
      Sell, then what? Another mortgage if they want to live in the area, or uprooting entirely. That 2 million dollar bay area house might have been a 20k house among 10-40k houses in the 1970s; today it's a 2 million dollar house among 2-10 million dollar houses, so at best you'd be doing a lateral move or downsizing into something grossly overpriced, or line up to become one of the 40 people trying to throw a cash offer somewhere in the stratosphere above list on some midwestern home. It's a zero sum game unless you upzone and build more housing to meet the demand, because the population of this country has only gone up.

11thEarlOfMar 6y ago

I'm not sure this is news? In December 2019, there were about 1.4 million existing homes for sale. [0] That same month, there were about 2,000,000 active real estate agents [1] [0] https://www.nar.realtor/blogs/economists-outlook/existing-home-sales-trends-2009-2019 https://www.nar.realtor/blogs/economists-outlook/existing-ho... [1] https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/quick-real-estate-statistics https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/quick-real-e...

masonic 6y ago
This fact, and the OP title, are confusing the snapshot of minimum inventory with "homes for sale". Since there were over 5.4 million sales in 2019, there were way more listings during the year than agents.

sschueller 6y ago

Is that wording correct? It sounds like actual real estate agents are for sale.

rossdavidh 6y ago
It's a sign of a frothy housing market when there gets to be a bubble in buying real estate agents. But be careful, in California if you even just rent someone your real estate agent for more than 30 days, it becomes very hard to get your real estate agent back.

ncmncm 6y ago

If they were for sale, they weren't homes. They were houses. Seriously. It creeps me out that RE people call things nobody has even lived in "homes". Places somebody else lived in are even worse. How do they know it was a home? It might have been crack house. "Crack home"? Anyway what you can buy is just the house part. It becomes home after you make it that, if you succeed. The idea that you can buy a home emphasizes the worst of American capitalism.

chrisseaton 6y ago
I think for many people 'house' and 'home' and interchangeable and the connotations you see in the language aren't what's intended.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  Obviously that is what Real Estate agents have lately got people used to. But that is recent. There is intrinsic value in different words having different meanings. There are reasons why we had two words. Those reasons were inconvenient to RE agents, so they fixed it. Everybody downvoting me has swallowed it whole.

mkoubaa 6y ago

I seriously thought about getting a license to save money when I was buying my first house

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

The title seems misleading to me. Let me explain. 1) Average homes sold per real estate agent, per year: 2.8 [0] It means that on average, on a given month, only 1/2.8 = 35.7% of active real estate agents will be listing a home for sale. 2) Homes for sale per year: 6,220,000 [1], however it seems that January 2021 saw that number go to an annualized of 6.69M. [2] 3) To say that in January there were "more real estate agents than homes for sale", would mean that there are at least 6.69M / 2.8 = 2,389,000 active real estate agents in the US. I don't have a WSJ membership, and therefore can't read in the article what this number is. I can only try to guess that it's either the total number of real estate agents (2M in 2019), or realtors (1.3M in 2019) [3]. The title seems clickbaity. The essence, I guess, should be that realtors are competing against each other more than before? [0]: https://www.rtrsells.com/can-you-tell-how-many-homes-a-realtor-has-sold/ https://www.rtrsells.com/can-you-tell-how-many-homes-a-realt... [1]: https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/ehs-02-2021-summary-2021-03-22.pdf https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/ehs-02... [2]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-home-sales-edged-higher-in-january-amid-tight-inventory-11613747681 https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-home-sales-edged-higher-in-... [3]: https://www.homelight.com/blog/how-many-realtors-in-the-us/ https://www.homelight.com/blog/how-many-realtors-in-the-us/

allcentury 6y ago
Averages are not a good metric for this field. NAR itself uses median to make it look more balanced than it is [1], but in reality - 80% of the transactions goes to 20% of the agents. [1]: https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/quick-real-estate-statistics https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/quick-real-e...

taurath 6y ago

Why don't we just simply tell people straight up "If you don't have capital at this moment, you most likely never will" because that is the way things seem to be going.

lurquer 6y ago

Can’t read without subscription. But, I was wondering... Is this one of those click-bait article titles that should read: “In January [, similarly to the last 120 months,] there were more real-estate agents than homes for sale in the U.S.” Note: I’m referring to the sub-heading of the actual article... not implying OP put the wrong title.

jb775 6y ago

Wouldn't the natural solution to this be real-estate agents accepting lower commissions? Or transition to a non-commissioned pay rate? RE agents historically provided massive value because they were the market-makers. Nowadays, they are glorified paper pushers and it's baffling they're still demanding a percentage of a massive purchase.

chrisco255 6y ago
I used to sell real estate during the last bull cycle of '03-'07. People got the same attitude towards agents then, when the supply is so low and buyers are high, it's relatively easy to sell on your own. But during a bull market being a buyer's agent is more work. People have full time jobs and can't spend all their time researching or managing multiple offers. Buyer's agents put in dozens to hundreds of hours of work per client and get no guarantee of a return (if your client goes to another agent, you have no recourse and you get no income from that transaction). If you're getting 20 offers on your house, then 19 of those buyers are gonna be disappointed and gonna have to regroup and find something else. During a bear market, the opposite is true. Being a listing agent now takes better marketing, networking, presentation and sales skills and it is easier to be a buyer's agent. At any rate, there are countless numbers of obstacles that can cause a deal to fall through, from financing, inspections, FHA approvals, title issues, personal issues, etc that skilled agents can much more easily navigate and close a deal much more reliably. For me, no two deals were the same, and it was always interesting to try to thread the needle when it at first seemed hopeless.

hellbannedguy 6y ago

We need more Brokers in California. For years, a Broker’s license could be obtained by 8 courses, An easy test, and a four year degree. The Realator's Lobby decided their were too many Brokers. They introduced a bill (A bill requiring years of training under a broker in order to get the license) to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold said he didn’t see the need, and didn’t want to stifle competition. Governor Brown signed the bill though. (I stopped judging a politician by there party that day. Both sides take a lot of money.) I would love to see the entire real estate industry decimated. We have given a very few of these people so much money for what? In the mean time, I would like to see more Brokers. More competition for the popular cheerleaders, handholding, and Omission and error insurance? Sorry about the tone. Realator’s have always irritated me, and most people pick them out by a personality contest?

austhrow743 6y ago
>(I stopped judging a politician by there party that day. Both sides take a lot of money.) Can you expand on that? Republican doesn't want regulation, Democrat does, doesn't sound like a party defying happening.
gamblor956 6y ago
None of what you said is true. I have multiple friends that became brokers on the last year or two, and none of them trained under a broker. They simply took classes and passed a test.

xibalba 6y ago

An large influx of non-professionals is often a signal of a late stage bubble.

rossdavidh 6y ago
The only reason I wouldn't 100% agree with you, is that I recall thinking this about real estate agents several times in the last 13 years, and it hasn't apparently ever been true yet.

dillondoyle 6y ago

Why haven't real estate agent fee %s gone down then?

TwoNineFive 6y ago

Imagine if there were more used car sales salespeople than there were used cars. That's what a "realtor" is BTW: A used house salesman.

perl4ever 6y ago
I have a vague impression that there is generally a low barrier to calling yourself a salesperson. Like, if you are going to make your money on commission, there's no need for gatekeeping as is expected for a salaried job. When I've been unemployed, I've gotten solicitations that are crafted to sound like a "real" job, but are actually sales, and it doesn't appear they care about qualifications at all. I assume you sell stuff or you don't. And real estate agents I've met are very...variable.

twobitshifter 6y ago

House prices are usually tied to income levels by 3x income. This is about what people can afford if it drive past this you have a bubble. https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... Look at where we are now. Housing is a decent hedge against inflation but not the great investment make it out to be unless you’re a landlord. The truth is there is a lot of upkeep and if housing prices rise you will have to pay the same as your sale when you sell. It’s great if you’re downsizing, or moving from an expensive city to a rural spot, but if you’re just changing locales you have to eat the transaction cost.

blackrock 6y ago
Then we are clearly in a bubble. Housing prices are now 4x or 5x of a husband/wife dual income.