Is the "Shadow Inventory" about to spring forth?
With the spring season upon us, and record temperatures set to heat up and break record throughout much of the nation in the next few weeks, many real estate analysts are trying to predict what affect the "shadow inventory" will have on our recovering markets. This so called "shadow inventory" represents three different groups of potential homes for sale. The first group is the sellers who put their homes up for sale in the past five years and decided that they would not be able to get the sales price they had hoped for in the market and pulled the listing. The second group is those sellers that haven't tested the waters yet, but have been sitting on the fence waiting for the right time to make that jump. The third group represents the foreclosures that have accumulated in the past few months while the banking industry has been trying to sort out the "robo" signing scandal that has plagued them, thus halting their some of their foreclosure listings temporarily. Though no one has been able to guess how much these three groups will affect our inventory, the fact that they are all out there waiting tends to make most of us believe it could be big.
This is not to say that the resulting number of buyers isn't going to be big as well though. Right now, we are almost in the perfect storm for purchasing power. With interest rates still hovering at or around all time lows, combined with the housing prices having dropped dramatically over the recessional period, there really hasn't been much better times to buy a home. It is hard to imagine what buyers will do once the interest rates start to creep back up and their buying power starts to recede. Until then, let's hope this perfect storm continues and begins to give our real estate the energy to keep reinvigorating our economy.
J. J. Bowers
Realtor/Owner
GreenvilleSCRealEstateToday.com