What the election means for the real estate market

Uncertainty surrounding the presidential election is often thought to give consumers pause when it comes to larger investments. This morning new data is showing the real estate market isn't slowing down as much as some realtors anticipated. Nine News real estate expert Lane Lyon joins us once again this morning. Lane is a realtor and managing broker at Coldwell Banker. Thanks for coming. Hey good morning, thanks for having me on. This is fascinating. So it is not uncommon for home buyers to pump the brakes around elections, right? Well right, you know it's this idea that there's a little bit of uncertainty going into the election and I would say it is the number one topic among realtors I'm in touch with every day. Many have clients who are saying, look I'm going to wait till after the election to list my house. I'm going to wait to buy. But actually some of the data coming out of October shows that our market really didn't slow down that much here in Denver. Last night I took a look at the five metro area counties right from the MLS for October. You can see, Cori, that home sales in October were actually up 29 percent compared to last year. I think a big driver for that is our mortgage rates were lower this year compared to last October which was when we saw almost eight percent. New listings also up 39 percent. So we had people going on the market. Average sales price was just over $700,000 of the homes that we're selling. That's flat from last year. So I'll take that. We're not seeing a decline in values as far as that goes. Days on market though up. It is taking longer to sell your home. Days on market on average is 48 days right now. That feels like a lifetime if you are on the market. But let's be honest, it's still the fall. Yeah. And I think the main thing coming out of this is that while a lot of people are hesitant and there is a lot of conversation happening with the election, we're really not seeing major impacts in our housing market. Why do you think homes are sitting on the market for so long? Well I think interest rates are a little bit higher. We've seen them go up a little bit. And I think that their people are choosy. Buyers have the chance to to take a look around for sure. So interesting. All right there is some expectation that things might pick up even more after the election right? Yeah there is some research out there that has looked solely at presidential elections across the country and that data has shown that when we have a presidential election we typically see home sales go up. This has happened after nine of the past 11 presidential elections across the country. Home prices actually have gone up after seven of the last eight presidential elections. So we know and it doesn't matter Cori in this research which party won or lost. It's an election. It's just passing that kind of place of uncertainty. And so we know that there are some people hanging out on the sidelines because of mortgage rates because of the election. What will happen here locally we'll just have to wait and see. But I think the big news again nobody's really hitting a panic button. So you mentioned mortgage rates. They actually have gone up slightly right? Right. That has surprised some people because we've talked about the Fed meeting. A lot of the rates did go down prior to the Fed meeting and then we had some changes in with our our economic situation. Jobs reports, inflation, things like that. I will tell you though the consensus is though based on some of these indicators that so many people are watching closely we are still expecting a gradual decline of mortgage rates. Don't worry we're not changing the news there. We could even see high five percent by Q2 of next year. It's going to be slow. We're used to things happening fast over the last couple of years. Take your time but we are still moving here in in Colorado and we'll see what happens on Wednesday. You had me at high fives. Okay high five. Yeah high five. As always Lane thank you so much really appreciate it. Good morning. Have a good day.