It’s A Buyer’s Market, So Buy!!!

Gary Keller, author of “Shift – How Top Real Estate Agents Tackle Tough Times” has just written an article for the January issue of Realtor Magazine. Here is an excerpt:

A buyers’ market should be just that – a buyers’ market. It’s not a fence-sitting, waiting, loitering, delaying, dawdling, postponing, vacillating, hesitating, wavering, faltering, pausing, foot-shuffling market. It’s a buyers’ market. By it’s very name it means that buyers should be doing one thing and one thing only – buying. So where are the buyers’ and why aren’t they buying?

The great irony of a buyers’ market is that even though the opportunity to buy is high, buyer urgency tends to hit an all-time low. The media becomes the excited purveyor of negative news and uninformed advice and buyers buy it all. Actually, it feels like it is the only thing they are buying. Their reluctance is ironic since not so long ago buyers were incredibly excited about buying – and it was a sellers’ market. Prices were escalating and it was perhaps one of the most difficult times to buy value, and yet people were buying like there was no tomorrow.  Buyers were afraid of losing out by not buying, even though the advantage was all to the seller.

Now a shift has occurred. Fear is still in the driver’s seat, but the tables are turned – the fear of paying too much seems to stop most in their tracks and immobilizes them. When they should have been afraid of paying too much, they weren’t, and now that they shouldn’t be afraid of paying too much, they are. It is one of the great paradoxical moments of any market, and the herd instinct at it’s most pure. Reluctance in the face of great opportunity becomes an agonizingly defining characteristic of a shift…

People who buy in in a buyers’ market are the smart ones. They aren’t looking for a killing because they know that is a matter of luck, not planning. They are looking for a sound decision with a predictable result and, therefore, ask the question: “Has the market dropped enough now to make a sensible purchase?” More often than not, when they are asking the question,  they are already in the safe zone, and the answer is yes.