I’ve been working with some first time buyers who recently opened escrow on a wonderful home in one of our suburban counties. These buyers did a good job of getting up to speed on the different neighborhoods and picking out the ones they really felt at home in. Like many buyers (though not all), they needed to check out several communities, and finally zeroed in on the one they wanted.

Anyway, the mechanics aside, what makes this such a “buyers’ market tale” is this little historical tidbit, which would have been unlikely in the extreme two or three years ago. To prevent the innocent, I’m going to adjust the actual numbers a bit, but I’ll try to be true to the percentages.

Original starting price of home three months ago: $565,000.
List price after buyer reduced price: $489,500.
Offered price: $474,000.

What makes this even more of a buyer’s market tale in my opinion is not so much the price reductions, nor even the low offer, but the fact that the low offer was pretty much accepted on the face of it (there was a minor “counter-offer”, but not on price). Frankly I was pretty surprised not to get a counter on price, but naturally I was quite happy for my buyers, who reaped the benefit to the tune of perhaps seven or eight thousand dollars.

So you can consider this a buyers’ market tale, but it’s also an excellent example of how starting too high on price can lead you (though waiting too long) to eventually be in a position where you feel a little pressure to take an offer that’s lower than you might have otherwise. That was always possible even in the bullish seller’s market we were in two years ago — it’s even more of a trap to be avoided now.

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