Welcome to the September edition of Monday Market Minute with Carrie McCormick!
In this episode Carrie talks about whether the market is slowing down. Days on market has recently risen for EVERY major Chicago neighborhood. Carrie shares some seller tips including having exterior photos done before the winter arrives, and making sure the property is move-in-ready. Then, I provide a marketing tip about making weekly 60 second Instagram videos for your contact list to get them hooked on YOU!
Carrie can be reached at carrie@atproperties.com or by phone at 312.961.4612.
Transcript
D.J. Paris 0:16
Hello and welcome to another episode of Keeping it real the only podcast made by Chicago real estate brokers for Chicago real estate brokers. My name is DJ Paris, I am your host. And today on the show, we are doing our monthly market minute with Carrie McCormick from at properties. So welcome, Carrie.
Carrie McCormick 0:35
Hello, thanks for having me. As always, you’re welcome.
D.J. Paris 0:39
Carrie comes on every single month and talks about what is going on in the market. What Realtors need to know what buyers and sellers need to know. And let’s talk about why we have Carrie on the show. Aside from being a wonderful personality for this podcast. She is also a top producer. Not only is she in the top 1% of Realtors in the entire Chicagoland area there are, by the way, 40,000 realtors, she is in the top 1/10 of 1% of production this year alone, probably almost every year. I’m sure she’s in there. But she has as of right now in the top 1/10 of 1%. I don’t know if you even knew that you know that? Well, that’s because you’re so busy that you wouldn’t know that. But I took the time to look that up just a few minutes ago. And that Anyway, she’s great. So welcome Carrie to the show.
Carrie McCormick 1:27
Thank you. Thank you. So here we are in September, we are in the beginning of September. And as everyone knows, I live and breathe real estate. And it’s been an interesting last 30 days in the market because the housing chatter has increased this summer of a market slowdown. And the data that I read appears to support those claims. And everyone is attempting to predict the next residential real estate shift. And you know, really kind of just the next financial shift in general. So here’s an interesting little story is I was on my last listing appointment the other day. And the seller and I great guy got into a discussion of just like the overall market, you know, the stock markets, the international market. And of course, we talked about the real estate market here. And on the counter of this gentleman’s home, he had shared with me the July issue of Fortune Magazine. And if you look on the cover, it’s this black and white cover, and it’s this gentleman announcing the end is near. And if you go online, you can read this article, it was written by Jeff Colvin. And it was I read it because there’s a lot of graphs and you know, history. And you know, a lot of predictions are based on data and graphs. And it’s called The end is near for the economic boom growth, and it will slow in the bull markets going to expire. Very interesting. Not that I’m thinking that the end is near whatsoever. But of course, when magazines and the media and you start seeing this on the news, you know, everyone starts talking about it. So it’s really been, you know, a hot topic for me to discuss with my sellers, with my buyers, and just, you know, general conversation. So if anyone has a subscription to it, I’d suggest reading it’s a great, it’s a great read. But right now, I think it’s too early to predict a change. And, you know, we’re starting to see some of the prices shift. I’m starting to see, you know, the some of the summer inventory that’s out there. People are doing price changes, you know, starting to cool down a little bit. But I always say that Chicago is a very resilient market and we typically don’t get hit as hard as the East and West Coasts when there is a cooldown. I think we’ll be okay for this fall. But we’re starting to see a little bit of summer inventory, making some of their price changes.
Now, I also want to just talk about the inventory because that’s also been a little bit of a topic for the last couple of months is the inventory and, and days on the market. So the median days on the market for the residential properties rose in every single neighborhood in Chicago. Or sometimes I always say that Chicago is very neighborhood specific. They’re kind of a market of their own. But I looked across every major Chicago neighborhood and everyone’s market time is up and particularly in Logan Square in Avondale. Now everyone remembers Logan Square was the hot neighborhood that you had to move into inventory wouldn’t stay on the market for a while. So right now for Logan Square the condos that went under contract last month spent 100 A No Not 100 210% more time on the market this summer versus last summer. So again, when you start look Qing and digesting all of the data in each neighborhood this year definitely or this summer, I should say this summer definitely took a little bit of a slowdown versus last summer. And everyone’s trying to predict why. Why did that happen? So it’s the question I get every day all day long. But I do want to also talk about some positive things, I looked at my my data. And actually, I’ve sold 104 homes in the last 12 months, for which it’s been very busy in the last 12 months, and my focus has always been on listing homes for sale. So I thought I would offer some seller tips for getting into this fall market. And number one, if you are going to be selling your home this fall market, you have to be realistic about your pricing. That is the number one thing, really look at the data, look what’s sold in the last couple of months, look what’s coming on the market. You know, just look at the attributes of your home and be realistic about your pricing. I’ve also noticed that when buyers come in, they want a move in ready home. Buyers do not want to do a lot of work, they don’t have time anymore, they want to walk into a home and feel like they can move right in. And buyers even have a hard time envisioning changing pink color. So you have to do that you have what I call it is setting the stage set a stage of the home, when a buyer walks in, all they have to do is fall in love and imagine themselves living there. Also think about this, when a buyer comes into your home, this is actually a second showing. The first showing happens online. So everyone sits at home, they look at your home online, they study the pictures, they look at different angles, they look at the video, the floorplan they have already mentally moved into your home. And when they come to your home in person, it needs to fit exactly what they were imagining online. So again, this is the second showing, walking into your home has to be perfect. The paint, the staging, everything about it has got to be perfect. So make sure you’re priced right for this bull market and make sure that your home is show ready for buyers to come in.
D.J. Paris 7:29
When would you say priced? Right. Are we talking about pricing to sell? Well,
Carrie McCormick 7:33
I mean, if you’re serious about price, about selling this fall? Absolutely. Because the fall markets have very short window. You know, we’ve got September, we’ve got October, we’ve got a little bit into November. But once we start hitting those holiday months, you know, really we’re taking the slowdown. And at that point, you might want to wait until spring market. Now
D.J. Paris 7:52
Yeah. What if your seller is not ready to sell this fall? But they do want to sell on the spring? What do you tell them now?
Carrie McCormick 7:59
Yeah, that’s a very important question. And there’s two important things. One, first and foremost, take your exterior photos. Now we still have leaves on the trees, the grass is green, everything looks good. Have your realtor come out and start photographing the exterior spaces of your home. So that is number one. And most importantly, because you do not want to be taking pictures in January, February, March and here in Chicago things do not look.
D.J. Paris 8:27
That’s really smart. That’s a very smart idea.
Carrie McCormick 8:29
Yeah, so definitely take your pictures now your exterior pictures now. And then start your updates on your home. So if you’re going to, you know, do some painting, or you know, I always tell people paint your front door now because the weather allows that you can’t do that in January, February. So paint your front door if you’re doing anything your outdoor decks, get them powerwash get them stained, you know, get your exterior ready. And then of course, start working on your interior projects. You know, declutter, take out some stuff from a closet, I always tell people that you’re moving anyways. So start boxing it up, you know, getting some of the stuff out of the house, do your painting projects. If there’s anything that needs to be fixed, if you’ve got outlets, if you’ve got light fixture or light your fans and aren’t working or whatever it is start getting those ready so you don’t feel the pressure in the spring so you can ease into it.
D.J. Paris 9:22
Now what about buyers for the fall? What are you telling them?
Carrie McCormick 9:26
So yes, if you’re a buyer that you’re on the sidelines, you’re waiting to see what the fall market brings? I would say that it’s going to be a competitive market. I think there’s going to be few options for you. So time will be limited to make decisions. If you see a house that you like, I would suggest moving pretty quickly on it. I would get your pre approval ready. I would like I said just move quickly because the good ones will sell fast.
D.J. Paris 9:53
Perfect. Well, thanks very much. We should also mention Carrie is aside from having all this great data and obviously being extremely successful working with buyers and sellers, she has a really impressive and absolutely worth following a couple of social media accounts in particular Instagram and Facebook, you can find her just by searching for Kerry McCormick real estate. So instagram.com forward slash Carrie McCormick real estate or you can search that way too. And same with Facebook Carrie McCormack real estate, if you want to see how to really run a successful social media campaign, I’ve never legitimately never seen anyone do it better than Carrie. So absolutely. Yeah, it’s not it’s absolute. Just the truth. Absolutely.
Carrie McCormick 10:37
I do it all myself. A lot of people asked me which company I use, and you know, who designs everything, but it’s one of my passions, I love design, and I love doing it.
D.J. Paris 10:49
Well, this and this brings me to my tip my my marketing minute tip of the week. And this has also to do with social media. So I was thinking about this. So my background is in marketing, it’s not really in real estate. So I always think from a marketing perspective, and I probably have more of a buyer seller mentality than a realtor mentality, simply because that’s really more of how I see myself. And I was thinking about this recently because we have it well, at your firm, there are 1000s of realtors, we have a lot of realtors in our firm. And I get the question a lot is like how do I do social media. And I always tell them, check out what Kerry’s doing. In addition to though I thought of something, I realized that oftentimes we forget that our contact list the people that eventually will become buyers and sellers may are not always in the market, right? They’re only in the market when they’re in the market. And maybe they’re not super, always super interested in real estate when they’re not in the market. But I thought well, what is everybody always interested in? And I thought, well, the weekend, it occurred to me that all of us share a commonality that the weekend is where we can do go do fun things. Well, not maybe Carrie, she’s always on showings, but everyone else gets to go out and do fun things. And I thought, you know, I know me, I personally because I live in the city. And I know carries the city all the time as well. We’re there’s so many things to do in the city, but not just the city, the suburbs, too. But there’s so many things to do. It’s hard to keep track. And I thought you know, what if, as a realtor, what one way that you can connect with your audience all the time, and this will always be of interest to them is to say, here’s what’s going on for the weekend. So if you focus in a particular suburb, for example, that’s even easier, because you could just look to see what’s going on. If you’re a particular neighborhoods in the city you specialize in, you can focus on that. But I thought you know, wouldn’t it be fun? Because I know, personally, I subscribe to three or four newsletters, including like Chicago magazine, and timeout and Thrillist. And these these, they send me an email every week saying here are the top things to do over the weekend. And I thought, boy, you know, wouldn’t it be cool to make a 62nd video, saying here are the three coolest things to do this weekend? So this is something any broker can do. I don’t know of anyone currently doing it. So there’s a huge opportunity, and maybe you specialize in a particular market. Give it a try. Yeah, well, I don’t know that you need to do anything more than you’re doing. But I
Carrie McCormick 13:10
got that idea. I think that’s a great idea. And if you look back in some of my social media, I didn’t do video, but I did. Like posts about the weekend. But the interesting thing, like you said about Chicago is I look to see what’s happening on a weekend. There’s hundreds of things to do. Yeah, it’s overwhelming. It’s overwhelming. We’ve got an amazing city and amazing things to do. But I love your idea.
D.J. Paris 13:31
Yep. So I will leave that with you guys is create think about content in addition to real estate content that your audience is interested in. So I always thought what’s going on on the weekend seems interesting. So think about that. And you can post that on Instagram and you could do a 62nd video, you just turn turn your phone towards yourself, make a quick video, and then call it a day. So anyway, we’re gonna sign off. So this was Thank you Carrie again, make sure everybody follow Carrie on Instagram and Facebook again. It’s Carrie McCormack real estate. McCormick has to seize. And obviously you can see how real good social media marketing is done. She does it the best. And we will see you guys on our next Monday market minute which will be in a month. It’s a lot of answering there. And other than that, thanks. Oh, by the way everyone should. If you’re not currently subscribed to our show, you can subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, anywhere podcasts are served. You can also stream every single episode we’ve done at keeping it real pod.com Find us on Facebook as well keeping it real pod. And we’ve stream all at least post all of our stuff there too. So on behalf of Carrie and myself, we thank you for listening. And Carrie, we’ll see we’ll see you next month. Sounds great.
Carrie McCormick 14:45
Have a great day.
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