According to the Wall Street Journal:
The red-hot housing market has achieved a number of milestones this past year. Perhaps the most telling is this: There are more real-estate agents than homes for sale in the U.S.
This phenomenon reflects both the extremely tight supply of homes on the market and how surging prices are persuading tens of thousands more Americans to try their hands at selling real estate.
There's more at the link.
I guess that explains why we keep getting real estate agents' advertisements dropping into our mailbox, asking us to contact them if we'd like to sell, and making glowing promises about how much they can get us for our home. We're not selling, so it doesn't concern us, but it's frustrating to have to discard yet more junk mail. (Why can't we make junk mail a criminal offense?)
I wonder what all those agents are going to do when, as it inevitably must, the property market tanks? The signs of that are already out there.
Peter
9 comments:
Those offers in the mail are from people working for REITs.
Big money wants out of the stock market. They consistantly offer 20% over asking price and make homes vanish from the market.
Watched a youtube video on how to turn scrap paper (junk mail) into burnable bricks for your wood burning stove.
I doubt it smells as good as a clean wood fire, but it lets you put the paper to good use.
I imagine some of the older real estate agents are seeing the handwriting on the wall. How this ends will probably not be good, and if like some times in the past, real estate agents have to make a substantial change in their lifestyle. The smart ones invest in something they can rent-to-own, and have a source of income.
Send me more junk mail! I can extract a few BTU's from every piece in my woodstove. No need to bundle or brick it, it'll burn just fine on top of a hot bed of coals.
There have been more bureaucrats in the agriculture department than farmers in the U.S. for some time now. A glut of realtors is just more of the same.
Junk mail you can toss or burn. Wait until you get the annoying phone calls!
A month or so ago we had nine agents for every house for sale in our area. Of course, based on what I've seen, only one of those nine was making a living at it anyway.
Junk mail is what keeps the USPS in business. Without it, they couldn't afford to deliver first class mail. It comes bundled and presorted to your local post office, so the amount of work the Postal Service has to do for it is minimal.
We're going to sell those houses all over again when people need to cash out of them and rent because they can't afford them any more. We get a piece coming and going...
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