Property owners will wait double the time, on average, to find a buyer. Prices are too high
Property owners who are placing their properties for sale this year are expected to wait double the time to find a buyer than last year: between four to six months. All due to increasing prices.
Although last year property owners took merely around three months to find a buyer, this year that will change, and the waiting time is expected to double. The warning comes from the Portuguese Association of Real Estate professionals and companies (APEMIP), and they are explaining that the required time for a sale to be concluded will increase due to the rise in prices, which are not within many of the available buyers’ budgets.
Most houses (48%) expected to be put in the market this year, shall take anywhere from four to six months to be sold, according to APEMIP’s real estate forecast data. Around 30% of all properties will be sold in three months, 13% will take seven to nine months to be sold, and 6% will take ten to 12 months to find a new owner.
These estimates show that property owners will take longer to sell their houses this year if compared with last year’s pace: 52.94% of all properties were sold in less than three months, while only 20% took four to six months to be sold.
One of the reasons behind this increase is the inadequacy of the offers in comparison to the demand in the real estate market, a factor which has been noted by many experts in the subject and which is quite noticeable to those who are trying to buy a house. “In 2019 the expectation real estate agencies have is that there will be a marked deceleration in the volume of transactions, driven by a shortage in the number of offers which are at the same time presenting prices that are above the potential buyers’ budgets”, the association noted in a press release.
Luís Lima, the president of APEMIP, has no doubts that this “panorama will worsen” and that in effect it already started being noticed. He noted that “the existing offers are starting to be completely inadequate to the existing demand”.
The solution goes through introducing more residential properties in the market, that target the lower middle class, thus rebalancing the existent demand/supply issue. “We are living a time when the problem is not a lack of clients but yet the lack of offers — but this should not motivate anyone to push prices even higher and cause even more imbalances in an already very imbalanced supply/demand issue we are witnessing in the real estate market”.
