You can glean a lot of information about the real estate market by watching trends in contracts. I sat down with Karen Daily Ekofo from EKKO Title to take a look at 10 recent contracts and see what we can learn.
Here's a hint: It's STILL A SELLERS MARKET! We see that there are less finance contingencies, less appraisal contingencies and less Home Inspections still! All these things point to a strong sellers market, meaning prices are going to continue to rise! You can see in the table below that of the last 10 contracts Karen has worked on, every single one was at, or above, list price. The two with the most caveats in the table below was the highest priced one (sold at list price $999,990), and the one that sold for the most over list (at 8%).
At the end we also look at another disturbing trend... FRAUD.
Fake Sellers, Fake Buyers and the importance of being the Sherlock Holmes of Real Estate Agents!
In the case of fake sellers, they are stealing the identities of of the sellers. This typically is with land with no mortgage and a remote seller.
With buyers, they "pretend" to be buyers, write a bad check for earnest money, and then immediately cancel on inspection or HOA docs, and then ask for their money back before the initial check has cleared.