Transcript:
It’s Tuesday Tuesday the 2021 Tuesday that still doesn’t allow us to tour homes, but we’re doing stuff anyway.
Happy New Year, everybody.
It’s great to be back and I hope everybody had lots of time to relax and re energizrand get ready for 2021
because we certainly deserve it.
Yep.
Yeah.
Who’s excited about 2021 out there.
River has been on my lap for the last because I work from my couch.
So now she knows she has to be on my lap.
But I’ll tell She’s a spoiled pup right now for sure.
Yeah.
We’ll post, we’ll post in the comments like a picture of each of our dogs for you of how they’ve been over the covid period.
Right.
Especially like the Christmas period because they were so snuggly during that time.
But post and then you guys post yours, too.
There’s no contest.
We’re just doing it because it’s fun.
All right.
Well, let’s do a quick recap of 2020.
We were really quite active at the beginning of the year and we had a lot of buyers and sellers looking to sell and buy. So when it hit, all of a sudden they still had to buy and sell. So we didn’t see the slowdown that covid gave us until probably
about a month into it.
So it was about March, about mid-March, when we saw everything starting to shut down. And it was quite interesting because I don’t know about you guys, but I was scared as a lot of people were as to what was 2020 was going to bring us. And we were really worried.
Yeah.
What’s going to happen with our client’s house values? Are they going to go down? Are buyers going to be able to find homes if nobody’s going to list them like it was a it was a concern for everybody.
So we went through about six weeks, which doesn’t actually sound like a very long time right now. But I remember how long it felt and we tried to come up with ways to inform our clients, inform the public. And we came up with this this thing called Ask Me Anything.
And we really started to learn zoom as everybody else did. Fortunately, we’re very technical as a team. So we were able to incorporate that into our business quite easily and get in contact with our clients.
So come about mid-May is actually when we started to see that flip switch in real estate, things were starting to open up
again with the different phases that we had, and 2020 became our best year.
It became one of the best years of real estate period. Prices sky skyrocketed and number of sales while they were not as
strong as the previous year. But that was because we had no inventory. So what we saw was multiple offers and we’ve seen multiple offers in the past, but nothing like what we’ve seen over the last ten months.
And we had to be able to guide our clients as to how to deal with these multiple offers. Because when I talk about multiple offers, it’s more than one offer coming on the property at one time. And they’re all reviewed at that time. And you very seldom get an opportunity to change your offer. So you have to go in with your best, fewest conditions that you’re comfortable with, highest price you’re willing to pay the closing date that the seller wants.
It really is what we call a seller’s market.
So we came up with a whole pile of different strategies. You can call us.
We are still doing those strategies and changing them as we need to.
But that’s a whole other conversation.
And that’s what we dealt with for the last six months and that’s what we’re still seeing now.
So what’s happening right now?
Because that’s the number one question we’re getting.
We are in lockdown again. So we have been thrown back into April of last year. And what I mean by that is
we are trying not to go out. We need to get our numbers under control because they are way higher than what they were back in April when we first got hit with this.
They’re higher than they’ve actually ever been in the growth that we’re seeing so far for Ontario. I think it’s important and I know our area is doing very well, but for Ontario, for Ontario and many other pockets, like there’s other pockets
throughout the country. But Ontario is really seeing this, and that’s why we’ve gone into Ontario wide lockdown.
So what’s happening right now is it really is the people that are essential, wanting or not wanting, but needing to buy and sell, there’s still a lot of people out there. Seems like for every house that comes on the market, there’s usually a minimum of four or five buyers for it.
So if you are looking to sell, we are still looking for listings and we have a lot of safety protocols in place for it. So where do we see things going from here? We’re going to see that switch flipped and when things open up again, I expect
we’ll see that that will happen again.
People will be more comfortable. They’re going to want to come out, get their homes on. They’ve got their plans. There’s a lot of people that have bought new homes that are waiting for them to be built. And close to those homes are going to come on the market that they’re currently living in and having to sell.
So we are going to see that activity.
Can we tell you exactly when that’s going to happen? No, it’s going to really be up to the government when we
see that lock down open up. But what we can tell you is we’re 98 percent sure I’ll give a 2 percent chance, but a 98 percent chance that that switch is going to flip and you will have more homes to view.
It will still be challenging.
I’m not going to say otherwise, for a buyer, so I really encourage you to call us. We have navigated it very well this year. I’m going to pat ourselves on the back for that. We have kept up to date from all the different sources that we are privy
to across the country, from Phil Soper, the president of Royal Lepage to our local Mark Rashotte and our awesome team that we have with with Jeff and Kent and Bob. We have a great management team and support staff.
And then we also have Richard Robbins, who is a really great real estate trainer that we are part of, and we gather all the economists information from all the major banks. We are not just making this up on the fly. We gather the information and bring it to you to help you purchase your home and to help you sell your home and interest rates staying super, low, super low. And the prediction about is that how they’re going to be staying for the year?
No, there’s not expected to be an increase.
If anything, it might go down again.
What’s really under two percent? Seriously?
Oh, my gosh.
Our first home, I think, would be 10.5 percent interest.
I know.
It’s true.
That was our that was our interest rate on our first home.
It’s crazy it’s almost free.
Yeah.
So get those refinances in. If you’re looking to refinance, get that done. Get locked into the lower rate. Maybe you can borrow, take some of your equity and do some improvements on your home. Buy an investment property, buy an investment property.
It’s a great time to take your equity and buy an investment property.
OK, so that’s our 2021 Crystal ball, look ahead, no, but I feel like I should have a crystal ball.
All right.
If there’s nothing else.
Oh, one thing we did want to say is please support local. We’re not going to talk specifically about any business. We want to talk about all of them.
So during this lockdown, if you have some spare money, you can order food in or if you feel safe order some food in or, you know, go through that drive thru, anything else that you can think of order online to do a curbside pick up. There’s lots of businesses that are doing curbside pick ups.
You don’t have to go outside and not just talk in restaurants.
Tour Tuesday Out.