Like some, I welcomed 2020 with rosy visions of a decade of EXCESS to come. I think my Gatsby-esque delusions were shaded in, in my mind by so many millennials telling me that “this is the new roaring twenties”. One that we’ll experience in OUR lifetimes, if we only make it so! The energy was palpable. Despite how the stock market would preform or how secure the pocketbooks were of those with embellished thoughts of a new golden age, it was as if their energy might take physical form and simply make it so.
And then we met 2020. Not at midnight — but in March. And, what a year it was. The pandemic wrecked incredible suffering and havoc at home and abroad. Anticipations of a vaccine to be found and distributed in the next month or so became high hopes for a cure in late Summer and then by the end of the year.
Only now, with the fortunate news that Pfizer and others have begun deploying vaccines, does it seem appropriate to boast about another topic: Philadelphia’s real estate market.
Following instruction from our Governor at the onset of the pandemic, in-person real estate activities were severely limited. I remember retreating to Pittsburgh with family and conducting “showings” by Zoom, where developers would walk my buyers and I through their new construction properties. If it hadn’t been for news of another potential listing coming to market in the following weeks, my buyers would have acted on the house we toured by video — SIGHT UNSEEN — and they wouldn’t have been alone in doing so. Wild!
In retrospect, my buyers’ willingness to purchase in such a foreign way was a precursor to how the market would flow the remainder of the year — and even now.
As showing restrictions eased into the summer and video tours mostly became a thing of the past, buyers continued to make moves, vying for their dream home in a market that had diminished inventory. Many found that if they were the first ones in, touring a house as soon as it hit the market, they could possibly avoid a bidding war. There was, and remains, quite a lot of strategizing within our team to position our buyers at the front of the line, crafting creative enticements to sellers in hopes that they will seal our deal. If memory serves me, every multiple-bid scenario was thankfully won.
The year before us will be wrought with increasing competition for townhouse and stand-alone properties as buyers continue to navigate limited housing stock. I predict that we will see an early “spring market” with increased, but still relatively limited, inventory which will be toured by an ever-increasing amount of incoming buyers from New York and beyond. Montgomery, Bucks, and Delaware Counties, as well as the Philadelphia metro and suburbs are very fast-paced markets at the moment and show signs of great strength. Our regional condo market experienced a bit of a slowdown at the height of the pandemic due to shared common spaces; there still remain some “value buys” in this arena but I look for prices to ramp back up as we approach the end of the pandemic in the coming months.
My friends who prescribed the visceral commitment to a decade filled with abundance may be onto something. Just as we collectively had to defer commitments and travels due to the pandemic, it’s possible that the new golden days are right around the corner — if we only want to make it so. ; )
Until next time,
Evan
