Selling Your Home

The Packer Group had a chance to sit down with Inman Real Estate News and talk about our experience handling the pandemic as a team. We managed to have our best month ever, kicking business into high gear because we are…

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Article From Inman Real Estate News. Written by BY LILLIAN DICKERSON | July 23, 2020

How has your market changed over the past few months?

Packer: Leading into this, we were having one of the better springs we’ve had. The Detroit market is pretty transient as it is, and so we’ve We had a unique opportunity to sit down with Dr. Lawrence Yun, who’s the National Association of Realtors’ chief economist, in February, and he had given us an outlook and everything he was saying just really supported what we were seeing on the front lines: We had a shortage of inventory. We had a buyer demand that was really high due to the interest rates being low. We saw that one of the greatest opportunities was new construction because that’s where we’re going to be able to get our inventory from because we’re not getting a lot of inventory from resales.

So we had a great in talk in February with him on all of this, and we’re positioning ourselves to be ready to take advantage of the continuing growing real estate market in our area.Everything was looking that way up through mid-March.

Then when COVID hit the state more locally, even a couple of weekends before the actual shutdown occurred, we were seeing really strong multiple offer bids, well over-asking price, and all of these indicators that would say we’re in a really, really strong market. Obviously, with the COVID shutdown, everything kind of hit a pause button. So then we got really acclimated to trying to figure out these virtual solutions, and we even still sold quite a bit of stuff.

From a team perspective, year-over-year looking at 2019, we probably were down 50 percent, but the positive thing is we were still selling at least 50 percent of our goal that we would have had during a time that we couldn’t do so physically. That, to me, showed signs that the market was really strong.

I had one property that we had six offers on during the shutdown. The only way these buyers saw the home was through a digital showing experience, and we still created a multiple offer situation on that property. And we’re not talking about a low-price property, we’re talking about a half-a-million-dollar property, which in our area, is a significant price point.

As a result, my team had the best month we’ve ever had the 15 years that I’ve been in business, we closed 30 transactions. To give you perspective, this month, July, we are on pace to close 50 transactions. So that’s what we’re seeing right now, is that there was this pent-up demand and we’re reaping the benefits of that and almost doing twice as much work as in our normal market.