The New York Times
17 June 2010
Before the recession, people simply looked for a house to buy. Later they got squeamish just thinking about buying. Now they are on a quest for perfection at the perfect price.
Exacting buyers are upending the battered real estate market, agents and other experts say, leading to last-minute demands for multiple concessions, bruised feelings on all sides and many more collapsed deals than usual.
It is a reversal of roles from the boom, when competing buyers were sometimes reduced to writing heartfelt letters saying how much they loved the house and how they promised to eternally worship the memory of the previous owners. These days, it is the buyers who are coldly seeking the absolute best deal while the sellers are left in emotional turmoil.
“We see buyers who must have learned their moves from the World Wrestling Federation,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of the online broker Redfin. “They think the final smack-down occurs at the inspection, where the seller will be reluctant to refuse any demand because the alternative is putting the house back on the market as damaged goods.”
Everyone expected the housing market to suffer at least a temporary hangover after the government’s $8,000 tax credit expired, but not necessarily this much. Preliminary data from around the country indicates that the housing market began swooning last month immediately after the credit was no longer available. In some places, sales dropped more than 20 percent from May 2009, when the worst of the financial crisis had subsided.
Builders have been affected too. Construction of new homes in May dropped 17.2 percent from April, the Commerce Department said Wednesday, significantly lower than forecast. Permits for future construction dropped 10 percent, suggesting a cruel summer.
Even the lowest home mortgage rates in decades are not doing much to invite deals. The Mortgage Bankers Association said Wednesday that applications for loans to buy houses were down by a third compared with last year. Applications are back to the level of the mid-1990s, when the country’s housing market was smaller.
Against such a backdrop of misery, buyers are empowered — and are taking full advantage.
John Porter Simons, a Seattle software engineer, thought he had a couple willing to pay $340,000 for his house. But they asked for $24,000 worth of work, most of which involved waterproofing the basement. “It was totally irrational,” said Mr. Simons. “My basement has never flooded. I live on a hill.”
He made a counteroffer to their offer, and the buyers walked. The house is now under contract to a new set of buyers, who got a cut in price and $2,500 in electrical work thrown in.
Buyers, of course, say they are merely being smart.
Chris Dunn, an economic consultant in Chicago, saw a house he liked last month for $539,000. He offered $500,000, but then his inspector told him that he would eventually have to replace the windows. The sellers were persuaded to kick in $10,000 more to pay for the work.
“We didn’t feel we were being that aggressive,” said Mr. Dunn. “We had the position, ‘If the seller is willing to come down enough, we will buy this home.’ If they weren’t willing, we would have just moved on. In this market, you have a lot of options.”
In some cases, agents say, sellers literally cannot afford to make concessions. Another $10,000 will push them underwater, which means they will have to arrange the sale through the bank.
“People cashed in on their houses to get money to go on vacation, for a new roof, to send the kids to college,” said Roberta Baldwin, an agent in Montclair, N.J. “They thought it was always going to be worth more.”
Even when a sale can be worked out, it is not uncommon for everyone to walk away feeling more aggrieved than celebratory.
“Buyers feel they’re not appreciated for simply making an offer,” Ms. Baldwin said. “And sellers feel humiliated and even angry. They expected to do better.”
Information about scuttled deals tends to be anecdotal, but Mike Lyon of Lyon Real Estate in Sacramento estimates that 15 to 17 percent of sales in his area are falling apart at the last minute as sellers prove unable or unwilling to give buyers what they want. In a normal market, he said, the figure is about 5 percent.
“This is the fallout from all the foreclosures: Buyers think that anyone who is selling must be desperate,” said Mr. Lyon, who employs about a thousand agents. “They walk in with the bravado of, ‘The world’s coming to an end, and I want a perfect place.’ ”
The tax credit, for all its flaws, may have helped avert financial Armageddon, but the final effect is still being tallied. In Indianapolis, the number of contracts signed in May was down 32 percent compared with May 2009. They dropped nearly 25 percent in Minneapolis/St. Paul, 20 percent in Seattle, 10 percent in Sacramento and 42 percent in Hartford. (A few areas, including Miami, showed improvements instead of declines.)
Pending contracts, if they are not canceled at the last minute, become official in six to eight weeks. Many deals done in April, when the credit was in effect, are still being completed and will be counted in May or June sales reports. So the severity and extent of the current slump will not become clear until fall.
The optimists, and real estate remains full of them, say the trough is temporary. The stimulus might have stolen sales from May but by July, they argue, people will need to buy again.
Indeed, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s purchase application index ticked up slightly this week after five weeks of decline, although the association declined to say the index had bottomed out.
John P. Johnson of Des Moines will continue to hope, as he has for more than two years now, for a market that is healthy enough to supply him with a buyer. His house, built in 1981, is too recent to be charming and too old to be new.
“When we upgraded the kitchen, we put in Corian countertops, which were fashionable at the time, but now they all want granite,” he said.
He had one offer in the fall, which fell apart when the buyer made too many demands (a shaved sales price plus paying the closing costs and all their other fees). Despite another price cut to $204,000, only one couple showed up at the last open house. His agent tells him the market is dead. The number of contracts signed in Des Moines in May was down 47 percent from last year.
“Keeping this house ready to sell is a full-time job,” said Mr. Johnson. “I never thought I’d be spending my retirement doing this.”
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