By Mike Bodeen · 18 August 2025
The Right Time to Buy May be Now!
Mike, you seem a little two-faced between last week’s Snapshot and this week’s. On the one hand you prepped Sellers to strongly consider getting their home ready for market – that it might be an opportune time to do that. This week your title would indicate it may be a good time for buyers to buy. What gives?
The reason I think it’s a good time for buyers to buy is what I enumerated last week about it being a slow market, rates trending down, and with market time increasing, many sellers want to get their home sold. Reality may be setting in, which could make sellers more aggressively apt to work with buyers. Or should at least. At the same time the Cromford Market Index (CMI) is now trending back up towards a seller’s market. (See chart below)
The Wall Street Journal had a piece last week that was titled: “Nobody’s Buying Homes, Nobody’s Switching Jobs – and America’s Mobility is Stalling”
It’s opening statement said:
Americans are stuck in place. People are moving to new homes and new cities at around the lowest rate on record. Companies have fewer roles for entry-level workers trying to launch their lives. Workers who do have jobs are hanging on to them. Economists worry the phenomenon is putting some of the country’s trademark dynamism at risk. Wall Street Journal 08.14.2025
I remember the days back in the mid-90’s when corporations were transferring employees all over the country. Companies were in much need of worker help, they were generously (lavishly) paying for the employee’s move, including financial assistance for the relocating employee first selling, then buying their home at the other end. In many cases the companies guaranteed the sale of their home, even buying it from the transferring employee. Buyers were sent out to find a house in two days – a dream situation for the Realtors that were getting those referrals – it was a guaranteed sale.
For the buyer? They had two, maybe three days to find/buy a home, not knowing squat about what would soon become their new life in the desert. “Yes, it’s a little warm in summer, but it’s a dry heat. And besides, you’ve got a pool. How cool is that? Rattlesnakes? Scorpions? Nah, they’re out in the desert.”
“For the buyer? They had two, maybe three days to find/buy a home…“Yes, it’s a little warm in summer, but it’s a dry heat. And besides, you’ve got a pool. How cool is that? Rattlesnakes? Scorpions? Nah, they’re out in the desert.”
The point of this diatribe is that our market is changing, and it does not bode well for buyers. The WSJ piece is a bummer, but it helps to give some definition to why our buyer’s market can still increase in value with terrible sales and high mortgage rates and now is trending back towards a seller’s market.
Will this be our new reality? Is the American dream unreachable?
Let me say it bluntly. Save for temporary needful circumstances, being a renter is a long run losing proposition. Ignoring the wealth building benefits, lock into the security aspect of not having to move at the whim of another. Raising a family and keeping them in the same schools year after year with the same friends has real value. You can make payments to the bank or the landlord. Either way, it’s expensive.
This too is our new reality.
Mike Bodeen
Market data referenced in this article comes from The Cromford Report.