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Realtors Bill Dermody, upper left, and Kurt Thompson, lower left, speak with The Warren Group CEO Tim Warren during an April 30 webinar.
With the ways residential real estate is bought and sold having changed dramatically during the pandemic, the work real estate agents do to qualify and prepare buyers is now more important than ever, top Realtors say.
“This is not a market for the curious,” 2020 Massachusetts Association of Realtors President Kurt Thompson said.
His remarks came during a webinar on the state of the residential real estate market hosted by The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman, and its CEO Tim Warren on Thursday afternoon.
Thompson, a Keller Williams agent in Leominster, said Massachusetts’ limited inventory of homes for sale and social distancing restrictions that limit opportunities to tour homes for sale have meant the role of open houses has changed, entirely.
“We’re really engaging the consumer, talking to them and making sure they’re ready … before they enter the market,” he said.
Whereas before the pandemic, casual buyers might have toured several open houses before settling on the qualities they’re looking for in a house, they now must come to in-person showings pre-qualified for a mortgage and with other details squared away, he said.
That browsing activity has now moved online with the proliferation of virtual tours, Greater Boston Real Estate Board Chairman Bill Dermody said during the same webinar.
“You can walk through; you can almost open the refrigerator and turn on the faucets. That’s almost the only thing you can’t do,” the Needham-based Berkshire Hathaway Commonwealth Real Estate sales manager said.
For serious buyers, busy pre-pandemic open houses also served to help increase competition and fuel bidding wars, but Dermody said the new, socially distant style of open house creates a similar atmosphere. With buyers now touring homes one-by-one in tightly scheduled blocks, they are still able to feel the intense level of interest in a property, he said.
With many sellers either pulling their homes off the market or deciding against listing them until after the pandemic, Thompson said inventory is now much reduced – down to between 1.6 and 1.7 months’ worth – and still somewhat below what’s needed to satisfy current demand.
“I would caution buyers who think that COVID-19 will create opportunities to ‘get a great deal,’” he said.
While prices may plateau this spring or decline slightly, the summer or fall months may see a flood of homes coming onto the market whose owners had originally intended to sell them in the spring, Thompson said. This may make for an unusually strong housing market in the second half of the year.
Dermody and Thompson both said that, for now, homes are continuing to sell without incident and credit is continuing to flow, even if some transactions had to be closed in unorthodox locations like public parks or parking lots.
“I think, at this time, we’ve addressed many of the transaction cycle challenges to keep transactions on track,” Thompson said.
Updated 1:57 p.m., May 1, 2020: This story has been updated to correct Bill Dermody’s professional affiliations. Dermody is chairman of the Greater Boston Real Estate Board and a past president of the Greater Boston Association of Realtors.
