Real Estate Trends

What is the average number of weeks that a buyer looking for a home puts into the search before finding a suitable new place to live? And, how many homes does he generally look at before a final decision is made about which property to buy?

Real estate industry statistics answer both of these questions with the following home buying information: folks who are in the market to purchase a home will typically conduct their search for around twelve weeks, walking through approximately fifteen houses in the effort to choose the right one.

Meanwhile according to residential real estate trends, 50% of the home buying population is comprised of first time buyers while the other 50% consists of those who have already gone through the process at least once.

What is the age that a majority of people become first time home buyers?

Real estate sales data shows that those who are in their early thirties are generally the clients venturing into the world of buying a home for the first time – an age range that provides plenty of opportunity for these young people to first get settled in a career with a steady salary that will increase with the progression of time, thus making it a much easier task to reach the mortgage payments each month.

Many also choose to marry and start a family as well at this decade in life, thus making it a necessity to purchase a home.

The latest real estate market trend points to the world wide web as the number one resource for seeking out a new home, with 74% of prospective buyers claiming to have sought out the educational content found on real estate information websites prior to beginning the search.

The internet serves the agents in the field in many helpful ways as well.

It is not uncommon for a realtor to own a website for the purpose of advertising his services to the general public in his designated area – which is one of the numerous functions that the internet provides to those in the business.

Social media comes into play here as well for the 84% of realtors using the internet for assistance in furthering their trade.

Sending out Twitter “tweets” about current homes on the market is one way a realtor uses social media to spread the word. Setting up a company page via Facebook, keeping a network of friends on a site such as LinkedIn, and posting industry-related blogs are some of the social media techniques a real estate agent uses when it comes to maintaining his business.

What are some of the real estate agent statistics that describe the people who are responsible for seeing the transaction through from beginning to end for their clients?

To start, the average real estate agent is a female individual working between forty and fifty hours on a weekly basis.

But regardless of gender, real estate agents as a whole share the following characteristics: 29% have attained a Bachelor’s degree, 11% have an Associate’s degree, and 32% have completed at least a few years of their collegiate educations though no degree was earned.

Although a great number of realtors are members of a real estate firm, 81% of these people still fall into that firm’s “independent contractor” employment category.

Many who have made their careers in this field are good at their jobs, as is evidenced by the fact that 65% of past clients say they would re-hire the real estate agent they previously used.

Sometimes a person doesn’t want to retain the services of a realtor and would rather try his own luck at attracting potential buyers to his home.

Choosing the “For Sale By Owner” route presents its own set of statistics to the real estate owner.

For example, the most common problem that the person selling his home sans a realtor will run into is not knowing how to arrive at an appropriate asking price. As a matter of fact, 23% of the for-sale-by-owner crowd experiences this obstacle, which leads to being unsuccessful in the overall selling process.

A lack of effort to fix and prepare the house to selling standards is another problem, one that is encountered by 18% of the group. And when a piece of property is not up to par for its showing dates, an owner can expect nothing less than a sub-par offer or in the worst case scenario, no offers at all.

There are not too many people without the benefit of a paralegal or attorney education who can make sense of the jargon that comprises real estate documents. Yet some do make the attempt, which can be more detrimental than helpful in the grand scheme of things.

As a result, 10% of for-sale-by-owner properties do not wind up making it through to the escrow phase right away because the paperwork was incorrectly filled in, specific forms were left out of the package, or signatures were not obtained where needed.

As trends in the real estate market continue to evolve, so too will more statistics be created to illustrate those particular buying and selling patterns.