best strategy to buy a property in the next few months

[Talha Parvaiz]

Hi,

I am planning to buy a property (first-time buyer) in Chicago suburbs, and few things that we have observed are that despite Covid-19 impact on the economy.

- housing prices are very much the same as last year

- # of properties available in the market are a little limited

- sales cycle time (from coming to the market to going to contingent) is relatively short. e.g., houses that we were following were gone within a few days.

Online-experts suggest the housing market to nose-diving around Aug'20 till the end of the year, and then it is expected to recover. They predict that the market hasn't gone down yet due to mortgage forbearance support, allowing landlords to defer mortgage payments rather than declaring bankruptcies. Once this support is gone (around August this year), we should expect to see bankruptcies impacting the housing market

Please share your thoughts and experiences.

Thanks

[Christine Lai]

I have to agree with you on this.  Many of the buyers who've intended to buy pre-COVID-19 were sitting on the sidelines during the lockdown so there's a bottleneck of buyers while the inventory has mostly remained the same and people clinging onto their homes riding out forbearance, which ought to expire towards the end of this year.  I'm expecting a lot of foreclosures around that time.  Can't predict the future but that would be my guess.