Home Selling Fears: The Stress Of Selling Your Home

Good morning and welcome to the Rick Helps Real Estate Show, where we try to make sense of this crazy Arizona market. And I've got some statistics here from a survey that was conducted by a company called Clever Real Estate. And they surveyed over 600 people about some of the things that they are concerned about or afraid of when listing and selling their home. And you got to stick around for this. It's really interesting. In other words, they started out by saying 88% of homeowners have a fear about selling. And it's kind of like, well, what are you afraid of? Well, 85% fear they'll feel pressured to accept a lowball offer. And that's probably a big concern right now in this market, you know, as the market's beginning to soften and be like, oh, man, I'm going to get a lowball offer and people are going to tell me I have to accept it. And so they're kind of freaking out about that. Preparing the home for sale is what homeowners see as a single most difficult part of selling, at least one in five saying so. Getting that home ready to sell, you know, sometimes you got to paint, you can fix things up. And it's such a pain. My phone is ding, ding, dinging away here. And I'm just gonna set it off to the side. Um, get this, um, a majority of homeowners 58% worry that a home inspection carried out as part of the sale will reveal problems with their property. And that I think is a very legitimate concern. You know, that's where most deals go to die is when you have a home inspection, because now you're negotiating, well, I'm willing to fix this, but I'm not going to fix that. Today's buyer says I want you to fix everything, please. And sometimes people are just digging their heels in and gone, not, I'm not fixing it a little harder to get away with in today's, today's market now says here, more than one in eight homeowners say nothing that would make them feel confident. There's nothing to make them feel confident about selling their homes. In other words, everybody's kind of going in with a little bit of trepidation going, nah, I don't know. You tell me I can sell it, but we'll, we'll see what happens. Um, 80% expect to use a traditional real estate agent or discount agent to do so. But 79% of them say they have worries about finding and hiring a new agent. So they're saying, I want to use an agent, but I don't know who I want. Some people, you know, they don't want to use a friend of the family because if it goes South, you don't want to ruin that relationship. So looking for an agent can be kind of tricky sometime. There is Renee. Good morning. So more than half worry about having to move quickly after selling. Now you can set that date. That's part of the negotiation being saying, Oh, I want to hang around here for 40 days at least. And, uh, you know, I don't want to move in 30 and it can be kind of challenging. It's really, I don't like to close on a Friday. So if I've listed a house and it's even whether I've listed or if I'm working with a buyer, I don't like to set the closing date on Friday. Cause sometimes last minute when it comes to lending, something comes up like they're missing a form or they're waiting for one piece of information. And now you've got to delay the closing. And usually you can delay it for a day. Well, on a weekend, you can't delay it for, you got to delay it till Monday, but you know, you got the moving truck coming, the sellers want to get out and now they're stuck for the weekend. So if you have a closing on a Wednesday or Thursday, you don't run into that problem. So remember that when you're scheduling your closing date, don't do Fridays. Because if you're going to close on a Thursday and something goes south, now you got to delay it a day on a Friday. That's a lot easier. You're calling the homeowner and going, you know, I'm, I'm toast until tomorrow. So, you know, that's, that's, uh, a better idea. I'm kind of reading things and trying to talk at the same time. At the same time, 46% are afraid their home will sit on the market too long. Oh, are we seeing that today's market? Yes, we are. What's the solution to that? Price it correctly. It won't sit on the market too long. And of course, pricing it correctly is probably our biggest challenge that we had in today's market. Almost all homeowners say they don't plan to sell in the next five years. Wow. Something is holding them back from selling. 91% say the most common reasons are not wanting to leave their current neighborhood, not wanting to deal with packing or moving. I'm just going to stay put. I hate moving. Uh, moving is a pain. Um, I also don't like painting. I can't stand painting. If I was good at it, I'd probably like painting more than a third of homeowners would speed up their sale at the federal reserve, lowered interest rates. Isn't that interesting? I'll sell if they lower the interest rates, but you're a seller that should be affecting buyers. I guess you figure that if, uh, the feds lower interest rate, that activity you'll pick up. Um, and away we go. So we'll see, see what happens says here among those with a mortgage, 47% are locked in a rate under 4%. We've shared that number many times here on the channel, a major economic downturn or recession would make the largest number of owners slow down on their sales timeline. Wow. Let's talk about for a second, because everybody's saying a recession is coming. We're going to get all these listings. Well, third of people out there saying, if there's a recession, I'm staying put. I'm going to write it out. Now, if they lose their job and they've got a low mortgage, they probably have better options than selling their house and going and renting and paying more for rent. But everybody's got a different story. But a third of you out there saying, I'm going to write it out. If there's a major economic downturn, I'm I thought that was very interesting. Now, this one surprises me. Almost half of homeowners would continue to work with an agent who lied about having a real estate license. Seriously, you find out your agent isn't licensed and half of you are going to say, no big deal. Hang in there with you. Seriously. You need to rethink that one. If that's how you answer. Now get this one. This one's even more alarming. Forty three percent wouldn't even fire the agent if they caught the agent stealing from them. How long would it take you to fire that agent? They'd be out so fast. Oh, you stole it. You put it back. We'll just never. We'll just let it go. How about this? Forty percent of homeowners wouldn't go through the sale if they didn't like the buyer, even if the offer was significantly more than expected. Folks, this is math, not emotions. Don't get into that bucket. If you don't like the buyer, you're getting money for your house. Just move on. And I've seen that. I don't like that guy. I'm not doing it. And I just shake my head on that. Here's here's an interesting one here. Let's see if I can find it. I'm getting a little lost here. So nearly a third of homeowners would rather take a below asking offer price than sell their home to their ex at the asking price. That's a nasty divorce. I'd like to buy your house, dear. Nope. Well, I want to give you your asking price. Nope. I'd rather sell it to somebody for a discount and sell it to you. More than one in eight would take their home off the market if they learned their ex was considering buying it. There's some bitter divorces out there. You're going to buy my when asked about get this thing up there. Emotions tied to selling the home nearly half say they feel sad about leaving or stressed out about the logistics of moving. Depends on how long you've lived there. A large number are worried that the buyer of their home will insist on a lot of concessions. 72% will back out of the deal at the last minute. We are seeing a lot of that. There is a lot of people with the concessions now saying, I'm not going to give you all that you're asking for. That's a bit too much. Now they kind of put this in a little bit of a graph here to show you what's going on. The light blue part is I feel pressure about accepting a low ball offer. Very concerned to 54% of your 31% are somewhat concerned. And that's how this all kind of lines up. Hope home prices will rise significantly right after I sell say 15% of you. You can't time the market that close. My home will fail to appraise for the agreed upon sales price. 14% of you are worried 40% of you are somewhat concerned. Those are legitimate, legitimate concerns. So what we're seeing out there is selling a home is not easy. And there's a lot of different factors that kind of keep you up at night. That's why you need to find an agent that works with you and understands that anxiety. And, and, you know, do me a favor and raise the bar a little bit and fire that turkey if they steal from you. Just that number is just sticking right here in my head. And I can't believe it. I had some news come across this morning on my email. And it's like, wow, really rocket mortgage is acquiring Redfin for 1.75 billion. Now, there was a lawsuit out there against the Jason Mitchell group saying that they were colluding with rocket mortgage and that they were getting kickbacks and all this stuff because the CFPB was suing him. And it sounds like that's going to go away because the CFPB is getting pared back down and going away. I hope it goes completely away. It's But yet now you got that same mortgage company buying a huge brokerage. So I don't know how this is going to work. I there's some things here. It says rocket and Redfin have a unified vision of a better way to buy and sell homes. So the rocket CEO Redfin has been struggling with financial losses and layoffs, but the acquisition could help the company better compete with other home search portals. Hello, Zillow. Together, we'll able to do stuff they've only dreamed about before said Glenn Kelman. It kills me how much money they've been losing. They've been losing a lot of money. But it says here together, we will improve the experience by connecting traditionally this disparate steps of this search steps search in the financing process will leading technology remove friction, reduce costs, and increase value. And they're saying that you can get pre qualified on the same day. Now I caution you on that just a little bit, because, yeah, you can get pre qualified, and they're going to give you a rate. But what are the fees for that rate? So you get a hold of a company like that, and you go, hey, what's your rate today, and they're going to spit it right out. Whereas a mortgage broker is going to go through a whole list of mortgage companies. But more importantly, they're going to do a deep dive into your financial situation, what's your debt to income ratio, what's your credit score, how much are you putting down all of that when you just get a quick pre qualification, same day, boom, here you go, you're qualified. They haven't dived into your real finances and done a done a big search. I mean, I've seen some times where you can save like seven $8,000 by just breathing, giving yourself a little breathing room and looking and shopping for a mortgage and letting the mortgage broker shop for your mortgage instead of you going through all that. So they're saying that they think they're going to streamline all that. I don't know this is going to happen. Good morning, Cassandra. This is supposed to, excuse me, supposed to happen. Later on this year, Redfin employs about 4000 people. Their revenue grew by 7% last year, but get this at a net loss of 164.8 million. But they only lost 130 million in 2023. Its stock has fallen more than 30% in the past month. I haven't checked the stock this morning to see what's going on. I'm assuming maybe it went off a little up a little bit, they got rid of their I buying program. These companies couldn't figure out how to buy a house and then sell it for more. It kills me that rocket, not rocket, but open door was losing money in 2020 and 2021. When you could buy a house and turn around and sell it in 30 days for 30 grand more, and they were losing money. And I was asking myself at the time, how, if they're losing money today, when real estate's going up at unprecedented levels, how are they going to make money if things just simply flattened out? Well, newsflash, things flattened out and they're losing their shirt. They're losing money like crazy. So I'm going to be watching this and see what, what happens here when, uh, with a major mortgage company, excuse me, like rocket buying Redfin, the tech industry right now is trying to integrate everything. The hardest thing to integrate is title. You've got a mortgage company, you've got real estate company, and then you're going to merge it with the title company. What does Redfin have that you can't do anyway? I mean, you can go out and search for homes on just about any portal that you have out there. Um, they've got agency, you can click on and get, but getting back to the fear that we had there earlier, that I am really nervous about, you know, what kind of real estate agent I'm going to be working with. Well, Redfin, are you just going to click on that little smiley profile picture and that's your person? Um, you know, you don't know him. Um, so you get a lot of that same with some of these big mortgage companies. You know, they, they tell you who you're going to work with. Well, we're going to get Bob over here in cubicle number 23 is going to help you with your mortgage. Who's Bob? Um, you know, and then you get halfway through the transaction. Bob has left the company. I had a good friend that was working with, um, I think it was Navy federal. No, it was USA. He was getting a VA loan and five days before he's supposed to close his loan officer's gone, not answering emails, text messages, phone calls. Nobody knew where he went. He had to go get another loan. It just, they just left. That's why having a relationship with your mortgage officer is very important. Don't leave me answer your phone. I had a mortgage guy wants that. And it was a small transaction, but he would never answer his phone until five o'clock on Friday. I finally did some digging and found out he worked full time at AT&T. And he was also a mortgage loan officer with people's mortgage. And he'd call me Friday at five o'clock. How's it going, Rick? And I would say, seriously, I've sent you 17 emails. I've texted you eight times. You call me today on a Friday and ask me how it's going. When are we closing? That thing was delayed two weeks, found out he was part time. I confronted him on it. He denied it. And needless to say, I told him, I'm, I'm throwing your name out. I see a mortgage come across with you, a pre-approval. I'm not taking it. So I hope he found that information, funny, interesting. If you're thinking about listing, there's a lot of things there that you're concerned about that people can help you with. And some of it is, it's kind of perpetuated by, by, uh, by the news. You know, I really worry about this. I worry about that. Moving is stressful. I can't erase that for you. Packing and moving is tough. Getting prepared well in advance before you list your home helps take some of that pressure away. Don't decide today in March that you want to sell on the 1st of April. Now you're doing nothing but just running and trying to fix things. Take a long-term view of it and say, I want to sell in May. And so I'm going to start today. So you just gradually start doing some of the work and getting ready. Takes a lot of pressure out. There isn't a lot of stuff that's going to change between now and May, unless you've got a relocation coming. I've done that. I moved three times with a corporate relocation. Now, the easy part for me on a corporate relocation was they moved me. Uh, they came and showed up and packed everything up for me and off they went. It was sweet. Uh, except for the one time when I moved from California, Los Angeles area to Albany, New York, uh, these movers were dreadful. They took, get this, a socket set that I had and put it in the same box as my wife's China. It didn't break anything, but she never got over that. They packed and they stole my camera equipment. I was into black and white photography, developing, taking portraits of my kids and stuff. They ripped it off. Now they paid me. I went to a used camera show in Albany, New York and replenished it and everything. But, uh, you know, this was a big national moving company. Now, when I moved from Albany, New York to Rochester, they did, they get, uh, what's called a white glove move. They had a supervisor checking, calling me every hour, Rick, how's the move going would show up. They let my kids sit in the cab of the semi truck and they treated me like a million bucks, got to Rochester. There's this one big guy that literally would pick up the couch, put it on his back, take it in the house. I'd never seen such a big guy in my life. So moving is stressful. Unless you take the time to research and ask people, what moving company did you use and how did it go for you? So I hope you find this information. Helpfully do me a favor, use the link below, sign up for my weekly newsletter comes out every morning at seven o'clock. I show you the Crawford market data. We show you some information on the mortgage market. And then on the bottom, I give you my opinion on what's going on. So I hope you take a chance, take a look at that link and sign up. Everybody have a fabulous Monday. Hey, if you live in the mid, uh, the plains region in the United States, check out the weather that's supposed to be coming on Friday. That low pressure system that's building is supposed to be the equivalent of a category two hurricane, which means a lot of snow in some parts, just East of Denver, huge wind and a bunch of wild weather, just South of the plains. So if you're a weather geek, like I am, boy, keep your eye on that. It's going to be wild. Everybody have a great day. Take on the rest of the week. Take care.