Vaccines, Inventory, and Interest Rates: How Will Real Estate Change in 2021?

A new year is here! And after real estate thrived through an entirely unpredictable 2020, we need to ask what’s coming our way in the next 12 months.

Will sellers re-enter the market and ease the inventory crunch? Will interest rates stay low? Will a rise in foreclosures impact your market? The biggest question is the one that impacts all of those questions (and others): How will a COVID-19 vaccine impact buyers, sellers, and your business?

We begin season 2 of The Walkthrough with HomeLight’s managing editor, Caroline Feeney, unpacking trends and data from our Q4 Top Agent Insights Survey, and five top agents from across the country help us answer those questions about what happens next.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to get future episodes delivered automatically: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | YouTube

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe to get future episodes delivered automatically: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher | YouTube

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Links and Show Notes

• HomeLight’s Top Agent Insights Survey Q4 2020
• Caroline Feeney – HomeLight profile
• Victoria Merchant – real estate agent profile on HomeLight
• Greg Klesius – real estate agent profile on HomeLight
• Frances Rosado – real estate agent profile on HomeLight
• Tom Tezak – real estate agent profile on HomeLight
• Geordie Romer – real estate agent profile on HomeLight
• Join our Facebook community for The Walkthrough listeners
• HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center
• Subscribe and listen to The Walkthrough: Apple Podcasts/iTunes | Spotify | Google Podcasts | YouTube

Full Transcript

(SPEAKER: Matt McGee, Host)

What do you think of when I say the phrase “new year”? A new year means new beginnings and new beginnings usually mean change.

[Sound effect: coins dropping]

No, no, no, no, not that kind of change. I mean, change. Change as in things being different, being better. That’s especially true this New Year after we all made it through a 2020 that was extremely difficult on many levels.

But when it comes to the real estate industry, how different do you expect 2021 to be? That question is at the heart of HomeLight’s newest Top Agent Insights survey, which we just published today, January 11th. We asked more than 1,000 agents across the country what you expect to change in 2021.

We also just spoke face-to-face, well, Zoom to Zoom, I should say, with a handful of agents to hear their expectations for the New Year. And we have HomeLight’s managing editor back to help us put all those pieces together. Inventory, interest rates, home prices. Those are all big questions as we start 2021, but there’s an even bigger question that could impact all of those.

This is “The Walkthrough.”

(INTRO MUSIC)

2021 is here! Happy New Year to you. Welcome to season two of “The Walkthrough.” My name is Matt McGee. I’m the editor of HomeLight’s Agent Resource Center, also your host here on “The Walkthrough.”

This is HomeLight’s weekly podcast. We put out new episodes every Monday. This is the show where you will learn what’s working right now from the best real real estate agents and industry experts in the country. At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We’re on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable.

Hey, it’s great to have you with me today. Thanks for listening. Please be sure, click that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, that way you will get all future shows automatically and no need to go looking for them. If you’re on Spotify, the subscribe button actually says follow, does the same thing though. We do have some really, really great episodes coming up this season. You are not going to want to miss them. And if you wanna get involved in the show, provide some feedback, ask questions, I will share some contact information at the very end.

Change is our theme today. We are all starting fresh. It’s a new year. A new president is about to take office. You have new plans and new goals for your business. Real estate is coming off a year in which it was one of the few bright spots in our national economy. Inventory is lower than many of you ever seen. Interest rates, oh my gosh, they seem to hit another record low every month, right? Home values are rising, bidding wars are common. And that winter slowdown, I mean, that’s not really happening, is it right now?

That’s the landscape as we start 2021. It’s also the background for HomeLight’s Q4 Top Agent Insights survey. We just put it out today, 70 plus pages of data and insight. It’s you and your peers talking about where the market is today and where it’s headed in 2021. If you want a copy of that, I will make it available for download in our Walkthrough Listener Community on Facebook.

Joining me today is Caroline Feeney. She is HomeLight’s, managing editor. She is also the brains and brawn behind our quarterly survey. Before Caroline joined HomeLight in 2018, she spent more than two years at Inman. So she has been on top of industry trends for a while now.

Also joining us today are five top agents from across the country. And I mean across the country. I’m gonna try to go East to West here, hopefully I have my geography correct. We have Frances Rosado in the New York City area, Greg Klesius in Florida, Victoria Merchant in Denver, Geordie Romer in Washington state and Tom Tezak in Hawaii. Think I got that right. With their help, Caroline and I are going to unpack important data points from the new agent survey, and we’ll do our best to figure out what 2021 is gonna look like for you. When will sellers reenter the market? Will interest rates stay low enough to keep buyers active? Where are home prices going? Will foreclosures be more prevalent? I hope not.

All of those are big questions for sure. But as my conversation with Caroline begins, we start with an even bigger question, when will we see the wide rollout of a COVID-19 vaccine and how will it impact real estate?

(BEGIN CONVERSATION)

Caroline: The vaccine is certainly top of mind. You know, and we talked a lot in 2020 about how a lot of home sellers were uncomfortable listing due to the virus, which was just one more factor contributing to these really low inventory conditions. But looking ahead, 50% of agents in our survey said that a widespread rollout of the vaccine could actually encourage more sellers to enter the market as consumer confidence rises and as the fear of listing sort of eases up. And if that happens, it could mean that later in the year, buyers could have a few more housing options to choose from as the scales balance a bit.

But I do wanna hedge that because due to factors like catch-up purchases in the latter half of 2020, low interest rates for so long, inventory is incredibly depleted. So it’s starting from a very low place. In fact, one of the key 2021 market trends kind of in contradiction to the prediction about the vaccine is that inventory won’t be replenished overnight. You know, 20% of agents in our survey actually say that low inventory will be the number one factor defining the market in 2021. I think countering the possibility of inventory relief is another trend carrying over from 2020, which is that 33% of agents in our survey say that this fundamental shift to remote work, the geographic flexibility that it allows is going to drive more relocations, more home purchases well into the New Year, which could very likely offset any inventory gains due to the vaccine.

Matt: You mentioned hedging this idea of the vaccine’s impact, but I think it’s important to mention too, because when you do the Top Agent Insights survey, you talk about, you know, 82% of agents say inventory is lower than expected, 92% of agents say it was a seller’s market. I know when you’ve been on before we talk about agent optimism is — you’ve been, what, in the 80 percentile range. Really, really high numbers, but then when we have this question about the vaccine impact, it was just 50%. So it seems like to me, there’s a lot of, I don’t know … uncertainty about what the impact is going to be, or maybe when it’s gonna start to impact. Is that fair to say?

Caroline: I think so. And, you know, whatever confidence sellers gain from the vaccine rollout can also be, you know, seen on the buy side as well. There might be some buyers who, you know, are waiting to make their home purchase until they can travel and go look at homes more comfortably. And so that could be another factor offsetting the market. I do think that, you know, overall the vaccine is going to be healthy for the jobs market. And so that’s gonna be a good thing in terms of, you know, fortifying buyers’ positions to make a purchase and could actually add more buyers in the mix. So I don’t think we’re moving away from kind of a competitive market anytime soon.

Matt: Right. That makes sense. Let’s hear from some of the agents that we spoke with in our group conversation. We have three clips that I’ll play and I’ll just introduce them in order. First clip that we’re gonna hear is from Victoria Merchant. She is an agent in the Denver area, I think just west of Denver, in Conifer, Colorado. Then we’ll hear Greg Klesius who is just outside Tampa, he’s in Hernando Beach, Florida. And then we will hear from Frances Rosado. She is an agent in the Newark, New Jersey area, Northern New Jersey, part of the…I guess part of the New York Metro area as well. And all three of them in their own way say what, Caroline, you basically just said that they’re not sure that there’s going to be an impact on the vaccine in 2021. It may take until 2022. So let’s listen to Victoria, Greg, and then Frances.

Victoria: I have a lot of clients here that are a little bit older, and I think as they are receiving the vaccine sooner than a lot of other people, they’ll feel more comfortable opening their house up to visitors and open houses and showings and all of that. But I don’t see it really affecting like a mass influx of inventory into the system, because there are so many buyers right now because of the low interest rates. And, you know, for those people that are not selling right now because of COVID, there’s also probably buyers not buying because they’re nervous as well. So for all of the influx of inventory, it might be met by increased buyer demand as well.

Greg: I think we’re gonna see a very similar year in 2021 that we have in 2022, excuse me, 2020. The reality is we’re gonna go through a period here during the winter and spring where we’re gonna still have lockdowns in a lot of the country. I think that’s gonna retard business and retard sellers, and buyers getting things done. I think buyer demand is still gonna be higher. I expect the vaccines to take way longer than they’re saying to get into the total population. I really don’t see vaccines changing anything to 2022.

Frances: We are definitely selling houses. We’re definitely busy. I do not expect that to in any way change in 2021. Do I think that we might get shut down this time around? We might. Will that obviously have an effect? It will temporarily and then when they open up, it’ll be insanity. But we’ve also learned how to kind of navigate the waters with everything virtually in 3D and so forth. And we were doing that in the height of the pandemic. So we haven’t slowed down. We definitely feel that the vaccine also will not be here for everyone for quite some time. I personally don’t plan on going back to doing business the way I used to before, because we’ve found a lot of more efficient ways of doing it now, right, that are definitely more beneficial.

Matt: Home prices have been rising pretty consistently throughout this, you know, this whole pandemic, Caroline. I saw NAR data from November of 2020, so a couple months ago, and I, I assume that’s the most recent that they’ve published. It said home prices nationally were up almost 15% year over year. How does that fit in with what agents are saying in our top Agents Insights Survey?

Caroline: Well, currently 74% of agents in our survey say that home prices in their market are rising, 24% say prices are holding steady, and only 25 say prices are declining. Looking ahead to 2021, 48% of agents predict that prices are gonna keep rising. What’s interesting is that’s up from 36% who said the same heading into 2020. So agents are actually more bullish on home prices post-pandemic than they were pre-pandemic. And then 38% of agents predict they’re gonna…that prices in their market will remain steady.

And sort of related to that, another stat we found is that 11% of agents say the biggest challenge for 2021 home buyers will be the struggle to find an affordable home due to this rapid price growth. So I’m afraid it’s a no rest for the weary when it comes to buyers who are facing this environment, where homes are selling over asking and values are running up. I think we have yet to hit the point where enough buyers have exited the market out of frustration, which would help cool the market down. In Q4, 75% of agents said that low interest rates have actually encouraged renters to speed up their plans to purchase a home. And when renters enter the real estate market, unlike existing homeowners, you know, they aren’t freeing up any inventory in the process. They’re only piling onto existing demand. So I think it’s gonna be awhile before we see price gains cool

Matt: Let’s hear what the agents had to say about that. This is gonna be a Greg Klesius again in the Tampa area, followed by Victoria Merchant in Denver. And then we’ll hear for the first time from Tom Tezak, who is an agent on Maui. And they are all talking about this idea of the conversations they’re having with their sellers. If they put their home on the market, if they sell their house, then the big question is where do I go from there? So let’s listen to what those three had to say.

Greg: People in Hernando Beach, Hudson, Florida along the coast, prices are going up dramatically, but they’re looking and saying, “Hey, if I sell this, unless I’m totally leaving the area, I’m not replacing it.”

Victoria: I’m having issues with my current clients that wanna sell, but they don’t know where to go because all of Colorado is seeing huge price increase. And it’s like, where you once could go buy a house for $200,000, now it’s, you know, $350,000, $400,000 and they’re not gonna…you know, they don’t wanna jump into another mortgage. They wanna sell where they are and buy for cash and where that was possible maybe a couple years ago, it’s totally not even an option anymore.

Tom: As far as people selling to take advantage of the market, I just was on a market analysis yesterday, and that was the question, what do I do if I sell? Do I rent? I don’t wanna move. And so that’s that bottleneck for that as well, but there is definitely opportunity for people that are relocating.

Caroline: Another major factor contributing to home price growth is the work from home trend, right? It’s kind of all connected. Tom who’s in Maui where homes are really expensive and where he’s operating in a major resort-second home market told us that he’s never been busier in the 20 years that he’s been in Maui because people are coming to use homes there to work rather than just vacation. In addition, Geordie in Central Washington, which is a mountain community, posted in the Walkthrough Facebook community that his sales volume more than doubled in 2020, despite the pandemic.

Matt: Yeah. I am friends with both of them on Facebook and it was interesting, Caroline, to see Tom, you know, I think back four, five, six months ago, I could tell, right, just from somebody’s Facebook posts that Tom wasn’t as busy as he normally is. And then just within the last couple months, the last, you know, 30, 60 days or whatever it’s been, he’s been posting a lot of, you know, listing videos. He’s been doing a lot of video tours of homes and condos on the Island that are, you know, just hitting the market. And then, yeah, Geordie, I, you know, I know Geordie and I’ve had numerous conversations over the last six months or year, whatever. And just the influx of Seattleites that are able to relocate — whether they work at Boeing or Microsoft or Amazon or whatever it might be, able to relocate to his area up in the central part of the state, gorgeous mountain area. It’s just been remarkable. Now, that’s two work from home markets. Does that play out in what we saw in the Top Agent Insight survey as well?

Caroline: Yeah, a significant trend emerging from our survey is this rise in second home and vacation home purchases. Currently, 66% of agents say demand is up for second or vacation homes. Sixty-one percent are seeing an uptick in people selling their primary homes in order to live in their second or vacation homes full-time. And as for why, you know, the three main drivers of this trend include the opportunity to work from home, number one, a lack of alternative travel options while the virus is surging, and low mortgage rates. So I think this is really just more evidence that the work from home flexibility has impacted real estate in more ways than one, and it’s going to continue to do so. It’s not only encouraged home purchases in general, but it’s also inspired Americans to essentially say, you know, I’m gonna work where I would normally vacation and I’m gonna buy a house somewhere warm or where I can go skiing on the weekends. For that better quality of life, that option is available to me, so why not?

Matt: Let’s hear more about what’s going on in second home markets from both Geordie and Tom. It’ll go in that order. It’s Geordie Romer, who is in Central Washington, and then Tom, again on Maui. Geordie is going to be talking here about how the sale of, you know, ultra high end, like million dollar plus homes in his market is way up year over year. And then Tom brings up an interesting thing that he’s talking about with his buyers, that a lot of them are in such a rush to get into their home on Maui, that he’s kind of having to talk them through this idea of maybe, you know, things being good enough and not trying to get everything perfect. So let’s hear from Geordie and Tom.

Geordie: In the Leavenworth market because so many of our folks are tech people, it’s really easy for them to work from home. And one of the biggest trends that was a surprise is the increase of size of home. Just the really large square footage houses that didn’t tend to sell as vacation homes in the past, you know, 4,000 or 5,000, 6,000 square foot homes, the sale of million dollar homes in our market tripled year over year. Tripled. And I think that’s gonna be something we’re gonna see more often. And I expect that, you know, that’s gonna continue all through next year, people working from home, and COVID has put people on a timeline where they would prefer to move in last month. You know, they want to close absolutely as soon as possible so they have that second home, that extra space to work from home, to homeschool.

Tom: You know, I find when I do some of my listing presentations and we have some of these homes that are tired or whatever, what I’ll tell my clients is, look, we just need to do enough to make it good enough until … you know, good enough until I can get a builder. Good enough until this is over. Good enough until… And it’s fascinating that people are paying a lot of money for homes that are not to the caliber of what they would have expected two years ago, to your point, Geordie, I think you’re spot on. I want it now.

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Matt: Caroline, when you were on after the Q3 survey — we had you on in October, I remember we were talking about what a great year 2020 proved to be in real estate. Surprisingly great, right? 2021 could prove to be difficult though for some, right, for some homeowners, some investors, if we see a rise in foreclosures. What is the current outlook on that front?

Caroline: Yeah. So as one of the additional impacts of the COVID vaccine, as a prediction from agents, they said…40% of agents said that the end of mortgage forbearance plans would cause an increase in foreclosures in their market. I think this has been a bit of a worry since the CARES Act went into effect. You know, what happens when these mortgage bailouts expire? Is it going to be another 2008 situation where we have a ton of homeowners defaulting at once? And I think the reality is that some homes will be lost when forbearance plans wrap. I think that’s what agents in our survey are acknowledging. You know, unemployment is still high at 6.7% compared to about 3.5% pre-pandemic.

But the difference now compared to the Great Recession and why I don’t think you’re seeing alarming headlines about this looking ahead to 2021 is that home prices are skyrocketing, right? And they’re not plummeting. So unlike 2008, you have homeowners who even in the last year should have gained a lot of equity and be in a strong position to sell their home if they need to before they ever get foreclosed on.

Matt: For sure. When we had the agents on our group conversation, we talked to them about their thoughts on an increase in foreclosures in 2021. So let’s hear what a couple of them had to say. We’ll hear first from Greg Klesius in Tampa who’s gonna talk about how he’s seeing that small investors are wanting to sell right now. And then Frances Rosado outside the New York area talked about, Caroline, what you just said about, you know, she wants to let her sellers know that, hey, you’ve got more equity, you know, and as an agent, it’s on me to let them know that they have this increased equity and maybe take advantage of that before trouble arrives. So let’s hear from Greg and Frances right now.

Greg: A lot of our small time residential investors, the guy who saved up, bought three extra houses is planning on retiring with the rental income with the three extra houses. Now, he’s not getting paid rent, he’s gotta pay the taxes. A lot of them have mortgages. Those homes are gonna sell. I have one of my small little investor girls, she’s a retired nurse. She bought seven rental properties. A week ago, she came to me and said, ”Sell them all. I’m not getting paid. I want out of ’em all, I’m gonna put all that money back in my trust account.”

Frances: I think the one difference for us, and I actually just sent an email to someone right before I got on this call because she sent me the letter she received for her foreclosure notice. And I think the one difference, she actually was speaking on a Nextdoor neighbor chat group. And I saw her, you know, and she was talking about foreclosure and I pulled up her name and where she lived and she bought three years ago. And I sent her a message and said, “I don’t know if you realized, you know, what the prices in your neighborhood have done in the last three years. You know, you definitely have equity.” So I think that the one difference in my marketplace is to get to these people fast enough to give them some options, to understand that don’t let that equity go in that foreclosure, but to, you know, educate themselves on how much their houses are worth right now, because we do have the buyers, we have more buyers that we know what to do with.

Matt: So there’s Frances talking about how she wants to educate sellers in her area, that they have equity. Caroline, there was a recent report from CoreLogic. In fact, I remember my wife actually did a little thing about this in her…was it in her newsletter on her blog? I don’t know. Anyway, they had this report out saying that U.S. homeowners gained over a trillion dollars in equity, just in quarter three of 2020. That’s as compared to I think it was quarter three of 2019. So year over year, a trillion dollars in equity. It was an average of $17,000 per homeowner. So that sort of, you know, really speaks to what Francis was just saying there about educating sellers that, you know, you have this equity and there’s, you know, there’s opportunity right there.

One other topic we should talk about for sure, Caroline, as relates to the, you know, the 2021 outlook and the Top Agent Insight survey — interest rates, always a hot topic in real estate. I think over the holidays, I saw a headline, didn’t it hit another record low? I think it was like 2.6%, 2.7%, something like that. What are we expecting to see in 2021 where rates are concerned?

Caroline: Well, in our survey, we’ve been tracking the impact of low mortgage rates on buyer demand since Q3 2019. And at that point, mortgage rates were roughly a percentage point higher than they are now, so like in the 3.7% range. And over that time span from Q3 2019 through Q4 2020, we’ve gone from 70% of agents saying yes, interest rates are boosting buyer demand in my market to 97% in our most recent survey. It’s the highest it’s ever been. It’s virtually all agents across the country are seeing this.

Now, at the same time in our most recent survey, 34% of agents said that mortgage rates are likely to rise with an improving economy, but it’s likely that any rise will be relative, right? Predictions from major real estate organizations on where rates are gonna go remain fairly modest. Fannie Mae I believe is expecting rates to hover around 2.8%, Freddie Mac says 3%, and the Mortgage Bankers Association is predicting a 3.3% average throughout 2021. So by historical standards, we’re selling that rock bottom range. And what that means is that rates are gonna continue to drive demand for the foreseeable future.

According to our survey, I mentioned this before, 75% of agents are seeing renters speed up their home purchase in response to low rates. At the same time, homeowners are trading up faster. Older adults are making the decision to downsize faster. And one trend that we thought was interesting and particularly prominent on the Pacific Coast is that 55% of agents in the Pacific region said that in response to low rates, parents are actually helping their kids buy houses…

Matt: Oh my gosh.

Caroline: It’s an opportune time, 15 percentage points higher than the average…the national average in the Pacific region. So I thought that was interesting to note.

Matt: That’s quite a Christmas gift. What did you get me for Christmas, mom? Bought you a house. Wow, yeah, it’s funny. You know, the interest rate conversation is always interesting to have, especially with agents that have been around for awhile. And I think it wasn’t it Tom, when we were on the group chat last week when he bought his house in Maui 20 years or so ago, like interest rates were like 10 plus percent. And so, you know, compare that to now…

Caroline: That’s pretty good!

Matt: Right. It’s like night and day. Let’s hear just one clip from that conversation we had. It’s not gonna be Tom. This is gonna be Geordie Romer again in Central Washington. We asked the agents, you know, what they expect for interest rates and what kind of impact they would see if rates do go up. So here’s Geordie. And he’s basically saying that he doesn’t expect there to be much impact unless the rate increase goes way up.

Geordie: So I’ve been a real estate agent for 17 or 18 years. And every single one of these, those years, interest rates have been at record lows. Every year we talk about next year, what will happen if interest rates go up and from 5.5%, they went to 4.5%, to 4%, to 3.5%. So it still hasn’t happened in my career yet. The thing I see right now with interest rates is a really wealthy people who can pay cash, choosing to get loans because money is free. I think the only the impact I’ll see if interest rates go up is more of those people will use the cash that they have on hand, yet the buyer demand is absolutely so high that I can’t imagine much changing if interest rates let’s say stay under five.

Matt: So there’s Geordie Romer. And again, just using a one clip from our group conversation there because Caroline, when we spoke…when we were on that call, I think all five agents that we spoke to when we got to the subject of interest rates, they all agree. They all felt the same way as what Geordie said, that there’s not gonna be much impact unless rates really go up, right, like a small rise, whatever from, you know, to 3% or maybe even 4%, really not gonna have much impact. So I think that’s probably a pretty common thought around the country where real estate agents are concerned.

Why don’t we wrap things up this way, Caroline? I mean, that was such a great conversation we had with all the agents last week. My feeling, as we said goodbye and wrap things up was that no one that we spoke to is expecting things to be much different in 2021 where real estate…where the industry is concerned. I think that was sort of the way that I came out of it, that everybody seems to think that this year, for the most part, is going to be a continuation of what we saw in 2020. Was that how you felt coming out of it?

Caroline: Yeah, I did. I think the major takeaway I got is expect more of the same. You know, so many of the factors that fueled growth in the housing market in 2020 are likely to be constants this year as well. Low mortgage rates. You know, the appeal of having enough space to spread out and work remotely, if you need to. Technology, that makes buying and selling real estate efficient in any environment, like digital closings and like virtual tours. Agents are gonna continue to rely on those tools. You know, the value of our homes, which has only been cemented over the last nine months will persist.

And I think the difference will be, if any, that we likely won’t have that market volatility that we saw in 2020, especially in the spring when the lockdowns hit and everything shut down. Even with continued waves of the virus the industry is a lot better prepared to handle those shifts and hopefully won’t be taken by surprise. You know, we’ve been here before, right? We’re in a holding pattern, kind of waiting for the vaccine, but in the meantime, we’re gonna sell real estate. And I think once the vaccine does roll out broadly, it will only serve to fortify the jobs market, which is great for consumer confidence and will hopefully just underscore an already healthy housing environment, which has somehow miraculously come out of this storm stronger than where it began.

(Speaker: Matt McGee, Host)

As Caroline wrote in the Q4 Top Agent Insights survey, a global pandemic couldn’t bring down the housing market in 2020, and the industry is set for another strong year in 2021. She also said, if we’re lucky by the end of the year, real estate’s success won’t be the only victory that we’re all celebrating. Amen to that.

Hey, let’s do a few takeaways. This is what stood out to me from today’s conversation.

Takeaway number one, the agents we spoke with all feel that the COVID vaccine won’t have much of an impact on real estate this year. 2022, maybe a different story. But for this year, they are expecting tight inventory to continue another year with a strong seller’s market.

Takeaway number two, they expect the work from home trend to stay strong. They expect the great migration as it’s been called to continue as people move away from company hub cities out to the suburbs and into second home markets.

Takeaway, number three, as Frances Rosado pointed out, this is a good time to let homeowners and investors know how much equity they have built up since they bought homes. Let them know that they have options before they get to the point of foreclosure.

And takeaway number four, the agents we spoke with expect interest rates to remain low and bring buyers into the market all year long. All five agreed that if there’s a rate increase, it would take a really big increase before there will be any impact.

All right. Any questions, any feedback on today’s episode? You can leave a voicemail or send me a text. The number is (415) 322-3328. You can send an email to walkthrough [at] homelight.com or you can find me, Caroline, and every agent that you heard today in our Facebook listener community. Just go to Facebook. Do a search for HomeLight Walkthrough and the group should come right up.

That’s all for this week. Thanks to Caroline Feeney for joining me. Thanks to Frances Rosado, Greg Klesius, Victoria Merchant, Geordie Romer, and Tom Tezak. Most of all, thank you for listening. If you like what you hear, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

My name’s Matt McGee and you’ve been listening to “The Walkthrough.” At HomeLight, we believe in real estate agents. We’re on a journey to find out how great agents grow their business, stand out from the crowd, and become irreplaceable.

Go out and sell some homes. Do it safely, please. And we’ll talk to you again next week. Bye-bye, everyone.

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“Coins” sound effect: (Sir Smith / Freesound.org)