Albuquerque homebuyer demand: what does it look and what the data tells us
(Transcript Snippet): “Tego:
Tracy. One of the things I’ve been looking at is this, this home buyer demand, right. We want to know, I want to know, you know, we’re, we’re real estate investors, we’re real estate brokers. We have a largest real estate team in, in New Mexico. We want to know, we want to be able to know what’s going to happen in our market, in the future. Right. We want to predict the future, right. So I want, I want the crystal ball, we all want the crystal ball. Right. And, and so I watch a lot of different things, but one of the things is a handful of key indicators that look at buyer demand, right? So what you, you know, what, what are the things that are going to foretell what’s going to happen with, with home buyers in the future? And one of the stats that we’ve had and we’ve had for a long time is pending sales, right?
Tego:
Well, pending sales is great. It tells us that the home one under contract, and now we’re going to have a closing in 30, 45 days. Right. That’s great. But what about before the pending sale? Right? What are the things that are, what are the behaviors that are, that are going on, that buyers are doing before the pending sale to kind of give us a glean into what, what what’s going to happen, you know, in the future. Um, and one of them has got this really great piece it’s, uh, uh, data that comes from realtor.com and they have a thing called market hotness, hotness it’s they only started this in 2017. So it hasn’t been around very long. And what they do is they, so realtor.com, if you don’t know, it’s like Zillow, you know, they have all the property listings in the entire country, on their website, every home for sale in the country, basically. And what they do is they can track, you know, what people are looking at, where people are looking at homes, how often people are looking at homes, how many times they’re clicking on their website. Right? And so what they do is they come up with this index that says, how does this market compare to other markets? And it’s a comparison it’s and, and what they’re, they’re, they’re doing a comparison as well as how much traffic they’re getting on a certain, a certain area market,
Tracy:
Really eyeballs on their site and non-specific properties too, to gauge how much activity,
Tego:
Right. Home search activity. Right. Which is, uh, you know, probably one of the first things that somebody does when they think they’re going to buy a home right now, until they get on welcome home abq.com. I’m sure we
Tracy:
Do have a lot of content there. Yeah.
Tego:
Yeah. And so, anyway, so that’s the first one. So, uh, the short of it is in Albuquerque. It’s very good. It’s hot. We’re, we’re, we’re, we’re still above. It really went really high. Um, starting beginning of 2020. And this was before the pandemic, before, you know, the brief recession we had because of a pandemic. Our market was already very strong back in January and February. I remember sitting here doing this radio show in January, February of 2020 going,
Tracy:
Yeah, this is a off the charts here coming up in 2020, and then COVID hit and then COVID hit. And we still had a few months of off the charts and we still had a lot of home growth price appreciation. Um, but right now the market’s hot and, and there’s other indicators, right. Besides that. So the besides online viewing, we’ve got feedback from our showing system
Tego:
And actually there’s two there’s, let’s put these in order, so, okay. So first off we’ve got people looking at homes online, right? So the next step is like, you know what? I should get qualified. I should go get a mortgage. Right. And so the next, the next step that we have is mortgage applications for purchase, right? Not mortgage application for refinance. Unfortunately I don’t have local data, but I do have national data. And it’s still trending about above, you know, 20 17, 20 18, 20 16, even above 2019. It went really high in, you know, mid, late 20, 20 all the way through the beginning of this year. And it’s come back down, but it’s still higher than previous years. So mortgage applications. Absolutely. Yeah.
Tracy:
Yeah. So, you know, we talk to local lenders, you know, legacy, mortgage, primary, residential, different different lending.
Tego:
I mean, there’s so many great lenders. And
Tracy:
When we talked to them, they talk about how many people they have that are pre-qualified. So to speak, have already filled out a loan app or in the hopper that are waiting to find the right house. And we know the demand is high locally. We just don’t have the stat for it. We have a national,
Tego:
Well, just another, this is, this is more just what we feel on our team. But, you know, we just have a couple of homes come on the market. And in the last week and lots of, lots of demand, lots of people wanting those homes so that the people are out there. The other one is what I call foot traffic, Tracy. And so now they’ve done their application. Now they’re going to go out and look at homes, right? So how many people are looking at homes and viewing homes. And that stat is very strong as well. And it’s really pretty much equal with last year, as well as I’ve got 20 19, 20, 20 and 2021. And we’re, we’re a little bit behind, um, 2019, both 2020 and 2021. And I think that’s more has to do with just the lack of supply versus the actual that people want to go look at them. Yeah.
Tracy:
Yeah. So what’s interesting is this just started getting tracked in 2019, right? So we know when we put a lockbox on a house for sale, we get the data of how many times that lock box is opened. And that’s where this data is coming from. Basically it’s appointments to view homes through an online system. So we’re seeing the fluctuations of how many showings are happening across our market, and you pull that data regularly and we can see it. So it’s pretty cool.
Tego:
So the, the, the last one and we already talked about it was pending sale, right? So pending sales is, is the thing that really tells us, okay, how many closings are there going to be here in the next 30 to 45 days? That’s generally the, you know, the escrow period. And like I said, a moment ago, we saw the second greatest number of pendings in August, 2021 ever in our market. So
Tracy:
There’s the hotness and with four different parameters of real statistics and real data to show that buyer, buyer demand is still very good.
Tego:
Here’s the headline. There is no indication of a fall off in buyer demand right now in the Albuquerque market for real estate. And, you know, and then you talk, you know, we look at the supply side, which we’ve beaten, beaten up pretty well is a supply side is very limited. Continues to be very limited. Homes are coming out in the market are going off the market very fast. If they’re good houses.