Midway through 2022, something very strange happened — the real estate market started returning to normal.
That’s according to Soldotna real estate agent Marti Pepper. She said after a few years of skyrocketing prices and buyers sometimes paying for homes in cash, agents are now seeing a slower pace, which is normal for this time of year.
But she said “normal” these days looks different from how it did before 2020.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Marti Pepper: We're not seeing as many multiple offers. They're still multiple offers, but not four or five offers on one house. Maybe two. And then we're not seeing people pushing those prices a long way above list price.
Have values gone down? I don't feel like values have really gone down. Just the pace that they were going up has slowed down.
KDLL: So, what does that look like for your office in terms of volume?
MP: In 2018, we had, on the central peninsula, 513 residential homes sold.
In 2019, 541 sold. In 2020, 548.
In 2021, 739. And then in 2022, 587.
KDLL: Wow, that's a big jump.
So, what is your advice to buyers and sellers right now, then?
MP: So, let's talk about sellers first. Because I feel like the people that didn't sell their house in the last couple years, they’re the ones that are thinking, "Dang, we missed out."
It is still a very good time to sell your home because inventory is low. People need places to live. There are buyers out there that have not been able to find a home.
So my advice to sellers is that if you want to sell any time in the next couple years, and you could sell now, sell now.
For buyers, I think it's going to be a little better for them, especially the first-time home buyers and any of the ones that had income qualifying loans. Because those people had a little trouble competing in this crazy market. So those kinds of buyers, they're going to have a little more negotiating power, now.
For a while, it was like you had to go in and say, "I'm not going to ask for any repairs. I'm not going to ask for any closing costs," because there were three people lined up behind you that we're going to do that.
Now, you can go in, you get your negotiating time. Buyers have time to think about it.
So, I think they're gonna have more time to make a decision. They're going to have more negotiating power before and after they get an accepted offer.
KDLL: It sounds like we all have to sort of readjust our expectations after these kind of unusual years.
MP: I actually had a buyer call me and say, "Why has this place been on the market so long?" And I looked at the days on the market — it had been on the market seven days.
That's not a long time on the market for the central peninsula in any kind of a normal market. For 2021, yeah, that was crazy.
You know, I predicted to some of the people that I work with — even back in the fall of 2022, when we saw things starting to change and we started seeing these predictions of a shift — I said what's going to be hard is the sellers that have been watching home sell so fast and hearing their neighbors telling them they got more than they listed it for, and now they want to jump on the bandwagon. And there's going to be a learning curve there.
