False assumptions zap Halifax real estate market
The housing market this year has been best summed up by an agent as `a buyer`s market without buyers.` What the market needs is for thousands of sellers to become buyers. To accomplish this, people need to believe that housing prices are not going to crash and the best bargains are now. The provincial government could assist by providing sustainable incentives to help the market start from the bottom up through the remainder of 2014.
Based on the record numbers of current listings, there should be thousands of buyers in the market, but ask any agent or vendor in Halifax, and they will tell you this is definitely not happening. One agent told me he had heard numbers as low as one buyer for every 16 homes listed. This does not make sense, because the entire premise of a real estate market is that every seller has to live somewhere, so every seller is also a buyer. Why are there so few active buyers in Halifax? Relocations and downsizing can account for some of it, but this phenomenon is marginal at best and offset in other areas. Could it be simply because many sellers see a slow market, so they figure, `Why bother looking until the house sells?`
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