Source: Market Watch —
Realtors are describing the second-home market as “stuck.” To better understand what that means, I asked a few folks in the industry to look into their crystal balls for me. We posed three questions to three housing experts. Edited excerpts:
EH: Buyers don’t feel quite the same urgency as earlier in the pandemic, and sellers are wanting the high prices they saw their neighbors get. Thoughts on what’s to come here?
We’re definitely not in the frenzied days of lockdown-induced homebuying anymore, says Issi Romem, economist and founder of MetroSight, a real-estate economics research firm. “…the big wave of adjustment to a new ‘pandemic state of the world’ has gone by. In other words, the big one-off bulk of people for whom it newly made sense to buy a second home because of the pandemic have acted on it,” he said.
“Those left buying second homes now are a gradual flow of people reaching the conclusion they can and want to buy a second home, as opposed to the one-off mass whose circumstances shifted all of a sudden last year. And even if the pandemic state of the world means that the flow of second home buyers now is greater than it used to be pre-pandemic, it’s probably still a trickle compared to that initial wave that’s passed.”
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