COVID19 Market Update March 17th, 2020

Filename: Twin Cities Real Estate Market Update with Travis Anderson, March 17th, 2020 coronavirus (COVID19)

Duration: 07:21

Happy St Patrick's Day here. It's Travis Anderson with KW, of course. I thought I would do a weekly market update video and talk a little bit about the Coronavirus. This is going to be a nice short 3, 4 minute video and we will just let you know what's going on as we prepare for kind of these interesting times moving forward. 

Number one, real quick, client updates, at least what we are working with right now. We do have listing appointments this week. We've signed a brand new listing coming on the market on Friday. That's 170000 in St Paul. We've got two appointments this week, one in Maple Grove and one in Maple Wood. I had an appointment last week in Burnsville. People are still having conversations about real estate. We have buyers right now looking in the majority of the Twin Cities. We have currently 15, 16 active clients, both buyers and sellers. And so no matter what's going on in the industry or the economy, let's say with kind of the fear of this Coronavirus, we are still feeling very active currently. So I just want to put some ease that that currently is happening in our business.

As far as a market update goes, listings are very stagnant. I think it's a good thing for the sellers that I am meeting with for them to understand or for you to understand that listings right now are at a flat line. So when I look at the averages, we have about 8000 listings in the Twin Cities active at any moment in time. To give you a frame of reference, the average over the last three years is about 11000, and that's average even including seasonal increases. So we are pretty low. 

We are 3000 homes on the market low on average. It peaked over the last three years. It peaked at 13500, kind of right in the middle of the year, June, July. I do expect listings to continue to increase as far as the number that come on the market, fully expect that to continue as far as our seasonal market might go and we'll see. I'll continue to report here as we navigate this coronavirus. I'll continue to report with you so you understand where the markets may be moving as best as I can without being able to predict the future, of course.

So currently, still stagnant. We really should be more like 10, 11000 peaking maybe at 14 or 15000 instead of that 13500 that we've seen over the last couple of years. On the same token, pending sales, in other words, buyers that are walking through homes, writing offers on houses, that's skyrocketing. I'm looking at a graph right now and it bottoms out in December every single year. It kind of peaks in the middle of the year. Over the last few years, I mean, it's a steep, steep angle. Let's see if I can get that, boom. It kind of looks like that, a steep angle going up. So every single day that goes by, more and more buyers are buying. 

Last week we put a home in the market in Lakeville, we had seven offers. This isn't every single home that we put an offer on and get seven offers, but that particular home did, which leads me to believe that at least over the weekend there were people still looking. Now things have changed here over the last two days. Businesses are starting to get shut down, but understand, at least for now I feel like the real estate market is moving the way that it needs to move in the way that we probably would normally see it move as far as buyer activity. We would like to see a few more listings, a few more choices for buyers, and I'm talking market as a whole right now. Your specific to market might be very different and that's something that we've probably already talked about or we can talk more about. 

As far as the co coronavirus right now, I don't think that it's affecting the real estate market at all. With that being said, who knows what's going to happen here? If we have businesses that are shut down for weeks, if not a couple of months on end, and then we start to see layoffs and people losing their jobs, that's going to directly affect the job market, which of course affects people's ability to pay their mortgage, which then would affect the real estate markets. So for the foreseeable future, it doesn't appear that we are going to be in any sort of catastrophic changes. However, we don't know what's going to happen in the event that businesses are shut down for longer than we might expect. That's kind of that market update, client update.

I thought I would give you a little personal perspective here on something. My furnace broke the other day and I started doing YouTube research and kind of went through the checklist items. I want to give you kind of the order of items if a furnace stops working and I think that this might be helpful for you and your family and friends. The very first thing we should do is check that furnace filter. It's interesting that I called my preferred HVAC technician and he was like, “It's probably a bad filter, dude.” And yeah, pull the filter up. It was a little bit dirty and that actually can make the furnace overheat, etc. There are lots of things. I don't want to go through the why, but check that furnace filter. If your furnace breaks down, that's the first thing. 

The second thing to do would be to check the batteries in the thermostat. My thermostat doesn't have power going to it. It's actually only battery-powered. So if the batteries are low then the thermostat doesn't have enough power to communicate to the furnace. It's really odd. Most thermostats actually do have some form of power, a low voltage type power to it, but maybe not. So check the battery in your thermostat. 

Number three, this is actually where my furnace has the problem. It's cleaning the furnace thoroughly. I just did some work in the basement, had some sheet rack dust all over the place. The furnace sucked up that sheet rack dust, plugged my filter, which I have been replacing about once a week since we've been doing the construction. It doesn't matter. It's not enough. So it plug to the filter and then some of that sheet rack dust made it through the filter or through the cavities in another way and it ended up kind of gumming up the mechanical components of the furnace. So it's overheating because of those things. That was the third thing. I ended up taking the furnace apart, shut the power down, shut the gas off, and then I cleaned it up really quick. 

The fourth thing would be if now your furnace still isn't working, then we would move on to, is there a switch that's broken? Is there a sensor that's broken? Something like that. But before you call an HPAC technician, before you call somebody to come out, where are you going to spend 150 bucks to have them out to the home first, change the filter, check the batteries in your thermostat, maybe do a cleaning yourself. Check if there is maybe a fuse, something that's really simple before you actually have to do like bolt on items before you call a technician. Again, my name is Travis Anderson. We are going to do weekly updates, especially during this coronavirus instead of our traditional monthly updates. I hope that this is helpful for you. Call me if you have any questions.