November 18. 2020
Did the Election Cause a Dip in the Real Estate Market?
Okay – the presidential election is behind us and there appears to be a winner. So now the BIG question on every real estate agent’s mind (and maybe on a good number of consumers’ minds, too) is this: Did we have the normal drop-off in residential property sales that we usually see in a general election year?
And the answer is (drumroll please): NOPE.
As I wrote in an earlier blog post, ordinarily there would be about a 15% drop in the number of homes accepting offers in November when there is a presidential election. The theory is that many homebuyers get paralyzed with uncertainty before an election. But as we know all too well, 2020 is a year unlike any other. And just as with the unexpected pandemic and the unprecedented election, this typical slowdown simply did not happen.
No, this is not just my intuition talking – we actually ran the numbers, week over week, throughout October and for the first two weeks in November. The average number of residential properties accepting offers in Bergen County was 274 in October and 279 in November (so far.) So there has been no drop whatsoever – in fact, it looks like there will be a slight increase in the numbers this month.
Pandemics do matter when it comes to real estate sales. Low inventory and low interest rates are surely contributors, too. As for me – I’m getting tired of uninformed folks waiting for an imminent crash. The truth of the matter is, the housing market is healthy and is out-performing non-pandemic conditions. And if there is a tighter lock-down on the horizon? Well, “home” will never be sweeter.
