GREENSBORO, N.C. — Imagine you go to an open house. And there could be 50 cars. Yes, 5-0! Fifty cars in a line outside waiting to see that property. That's real according to real estate folks in Miami.
If that’s not enough to strike fear into a buyer, add in the bidding wars. “It's insane. It's just insane, that's the best word I can think of for it. I mean, we've seen tens of thousands, even $100,000 above list price,” said Latrice McFadden, a real estate agent in Durham.
Nationally, the average home value appreciation jumped 11.2% from April 2020 to April 2021.
How do buyers do it? So many aren’t, but a California family has been living out of a hotel and minivan for months looking for a new home in Tennessee and thinks they’ve come up with a way to land their next home.
They're going door to door and handing out fliers to homeowners.
“It's all about momma guerilla marketing right now because there are not many homes on the market and they go fast, and we really do have a dream in our mind of something that we want, we want the front porch, a yard, and things like that," said homebuyer Kat Reue.
Kat is making it lucrative for her kids. Her daughter gets ten cents for every flier she puts on a porch.
Why is this happening? - Demand. While the Triad has seen a falling amount of available homes decrease over the past five years, inventory fell off the table at the beginning of the pandemic, Keller Williams' Jason Coleman said. Coleman saw a majority of people take their homes off the market for fear of job loss or financial uncertainty during the spring of 2021.
This caused a restriction on the supply of homes, but many realtors believed the housing market would reset as time went along. Many did not account for what Coleman described as "the work-from-home" effect the Triad has experienced.
During the pandemic, people from high cost-of-living states like California and the northeast began searching for more affordable places to live as technology allowed them to work and live in different states, Coleman said. Demand for available homes skyrocketed, driving the price of homes through the roof.
Coleman said the sudden, massive appreciation then attracted real estate investors to the area, keen to cash in on the Triad's 'appreciation market.' This left local buyers competing with more and more out-of-state buyers, further driving up home appreciation, creating a cycle.