Spring Greetings Fans, This is my favorite season of the year along with summer. Things are just so warm and nice. Flowers are blooming, the wind is warmer, and pool time is right around the corner. Things are not warming up like usual in our real estate market. Spring and early summer tend to be some of our biggest sales periods. Currently we are seventeen closed escrows behind last year. This is disappointing. Most Realtors I speak with feel like things are better this year, but the numbers do not lie. Last week, mortgage rates dropped into the high 5% to low 6% range. By the end of the week,…

Greetings Fans, It sure feels like things are ramping up, but the numbers sure don’t show it! I write my updates in the early part of the month and send them by mid-month. Sometimes we can see changes taking place in just those few weeks that I try to address in this cover letter. After attending several community events in the last few weeks and talking to other agents, everyone confirmed it feels busier, but the numbers don’t show it. Maybe when the weather turns warm again, buyers will spring like wildflowers in the Park. Maybe! One big issue that will have a lasting impact on our community is the…

Happy Love Month Fans, The New Year has come and gone and now we find ourselves almost 7 weeks into 2025. Already so much is happening and yet so little at the same time. If I can offer one word to those Real Estate Fans out there, it would be HOPE! To be real, hope manifests in the future. We clearly are not there, but I believe we are at the turning point. It could happen later this year or next, but I believe we are in for a good run on real estate sales and values in our Hi Desert communities. So much is going on in our area,…

Greetings Real Estate Fans, Happy New Year to you and your family. New year, same story. In the last two weeks, rates have shot up back above 7%. Not only that but the economic news has been poor in the first few weeks of our new year. Many indicators are showing that rates may stay at this level for several months. Time will tell. I will be sending another email in the next few days addressing my forecast for this year. In this Update we can see the December numbers along with the year-end numbers for our local market. To be clear, 2024 was bad. Really bad. I have been…

Happy Holidays, Real Estate Fans! The Holidays are upon us. As usual, this brings our real estate market almost to a stop. With the cooler weather and lots of traveling, it seems every year we slow around this time. You might say it is tradition! Attached is the December Update. Since it is the holidays, I am not going to bore you with opinion. We can all read what the numbers tell us. Instead, I would like to offer you hope. I am an optimist. Hope rolls off my tongue easier than despair. Sure, this year will end with some of the lowest sales seen, nationwide and locally. But on…

Greetings Fans, “Now up is down, left is right, Day is night now, in is out, black is white.” –Eminem This sounds a lot like our local real estate market. Although I believe our national market is getting more and more like our local market. Take a look at this graph: The National Association of Realtors is about to disclose that 2024 will have the lowest real estate sales nationally since 1995! Read that again. The lowest sales in almost 30 years! Regardless of the reason, we all must agree the market is broken and needs to be restarted. How? My first guess is to make housing more affordable again…

Happy Fall Real Estate Fans, Finally, the weather has calmed down. It now looks like we will have about a three week fall and then a major drop in temperatures again. For now, it is nice to feel the fall desert weather. The market went sideways since the Feds dropped rates. It was assumed that T-bills (which mortgage interest rates are based) would follow, and they did for about a week or two. Then they climbed back up. Today they are higher than before the drop. And it’s only been a few weeks since the adjustment. In our local market, instead of buyers coming back we found Sellers jumped back…

Greetings Real Estate Fans, Whew!! Looks like summer is about to leave us. Thank goodness. I am a sun guy but enough is enough! I am ready for fall temperatures. As for our local real estate market, we melted in the heat. Last month we closed escrow on just 73 homes. At this pace we will not close over 1,000 homes in our communities for the year. This is a very poor showing for us. My opinion? We cannot rely on tourism to drive our economy. We need to produce real jobs to have a consistent real estate market. Restaurant and retail workers cannot afford a $500,000 plus home. We…

Warm Greetings Real Estate Fans, What other temperature greeting could I give? As far as the weather, July was the hottest month I have ever spent in our communities. I used to tell new residents you could count on your fingers how many times we break 100°. Not anymore! The whole month of July was over 100° every day. As far as our local real estate market is concerned, you could say we are ice cold. Only 86 homes closed last month. At this rate we will not sell over 1,000 homes this year. It is possible we will not break 900. What a fall we are experiencing. This is…