Homeowners who waited to sell often left carrying two properties

水管工 · 发表于 2007-11-13 09:50

Homeowners who waited to sell often left carrying two properties
Bill Mah, The Edmonton Journal
Published: 7:09 am
EDMONTON - If only Phil Anselmo and his wife had put their bungalow up for sale when they started building their Sherwood Park home last September, instead of waiting to list it in early June.

If they had, it's pretty certain the home, now sitting empty, would have sold by now. Instead, it's one of Edmonton's 9,577 vacant single-family dwellings languishing in a buyers' market.

"We were under the impression that moving a house would be quick," said Anselmo, a financial adviser with a big bank.

If only he'd listened to his wife. "My wife kept telling me we should list the house and sell it."

Anselmo wondered: If buyers took possession of the 1,420-square-foot Larkspur bungalow, where would they stay and where would they put their furniture while their new home went up?

"So, I held off because the market was strong and oil is $90 a barrel and I'm supposed to know this stuff."

When the real estate agent pounded the "For Sale" sign into their lawn that June day, it was as if the very act deflated the market.

"It's just like the taps turned off," said Pat Liviniuk, the Anselmos' real estate agent. "Since 1994, I've never held as many listings as I've held in the last couple of months."

She pegs the sudden shift as taking place between May 28 and June 1.

"A lot of the speculative homes came onto the market. A lot of the homes are from people who own homes and contracted out builders in order to flip these homes. A lot of them are homes that people never intended to live in."

Buyers, meanwhile, are waiting for prices to drop even further.

Carolyn Pratt, president of the Realtors Association of Edmonton, estimates that 2,490 of the single-family dwellings available as of Oct. 31 are vacant. Most of the owners have moved to other homes. Another 9.3 per cent are new homes that have never been occupied.

"The owner may have moved into a newer home and is carrying two mortgages or may not be able to find a tenant at rental rates required to cover the higher purchase price," Pratt said.

She said some buyers may not be in a rush to sell a second, vacant home if it's mortgage-free.

Anselmo said he and his wife are not financially strapped and are prepared to wait out the downturn. "We believe that once this inventory is knocked down a bit, the market will start acting and behaving normally again, and then we'll see what prices come from that."

Heading into the sixth month since it listed, the Anselmos have dropped the asking price more than 10 per cent. Still, there have been no takers.

Plenty of tire-kickers have showed up though, making offers conditional on the buyer selling their own home -- a demand unheard of just a few months ago, when buyers wooed sellers with unconditional offers to edge out the competition.

But Anselmo isn't willing to risk tying up their house for months while a buyer's overpriced house sits unsold, he said.

Pratt said it could take six months until the stock of homes falls to a more balanced 5,000, as investors and speculators take their properties off the market.

Liviniuk agrees. "Once the inventory starts going down, we'll come to a nice, level market, something we haven't seen since 1999," she said.

ComFree says it will take some time to achieve a balanced real estate market.

"One statistic that you can't ignore is that there is still an expected 100,000-plus people moving to Alberta in 2008 who all need somewhere to live," company presidents Travis and Erin Holowach said in a news release.

Email to a friend

Printer friendly
Font:****Richard Goatcher, a market analyst with the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., said what's happening is highly unusual.

"I don't think we have seen anything in Alberta quite like this," Goatcher said.

"Normally, you when you get a market that's oversupplied ... (it is because) there's an economic downturn and you have a lot of people leaving town and they're all trying to sell and that puts downward pressure on prices."

In this case, builders responded to a market shortage of homes by building many more. "And now we've gone from being an extremely undersupplied market in the spring to an oversupplied market in the fall.

"And a number of people have been caught when they didn't sell their existing home when they should have. They gambled."

Goatcher predicts fewer new housing starts in the next few months as the home construction industry adjusts again.

Besides home buyers, renters stand to benefit too, Goatcher said.

Properties, such as townhouses and apartments bought by investors intending to flip them, may be rented out as a stop-gap until the housing inventory falls, which would ease a tight rental market.

"For both renters and buyers, it's certainly a way better landscape than it was at this time last year. For sellers and builders, it's a lot tougher."

The CMHC says it was expecting to see an apartment vacancy rate of about one per cent for its current forecast, to be released Dec. 13. That number may now be closer to 1.5 per cent, Goatcher said.

Despite the inventory, Edmonton home prices rose slightly in October. The average price for all housing units gained one per cent from September, to $347,668. Single-family houses, however, slipped 0.6 per cent to $397,198. Condos fell 2.9 per cent to $262,875.

Anselmo and his wife have considered renting out their house, but don't want the hassles. Instead, they're renovating inside to add some value.

Despite getting caught in the downturn, Anselmo sounds philosophical.

"People were put under a gun to buy whatever was out there. Now, they have a choice. The speculators and the homesellers had their turn."

bmah@thejournal.canwest.com

© The Edmonton Journal 2007

yj151 · 发表于 2007-11-13 22:06

账号		自动登录	找回密码
密码			注册