Author: Stacy Carlson

Real estate market conditions are affected by a wide variety of factors. Despite the difficulties presented by the pandemic, the market was strong nationally and in the Deep Creek Lake area.

While we don’t have a crystal ball that shows the future with certainty, we do have some real estate market predictions for 2021 courtesy of Realty Biz News.

2021 Real Estate Market Predictions from Realty Biz News

The U.S. economy will see recovery in 2021. The National Bureau of Economic Research defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.” After reviewing factors that indicate a recession, the data suggests that 2021 will generally see positive increases in the economy.

Buyer demand will continue to grow. With the return of economic stability and increases in personal incomes, the number of first-time home buyers will rise. This will create more competition for desirable homes and upward trends in home prices. 

Positive factors that fuel demand include continued population growth, rebounding personal income rates, and improving consumer confidence. President-Elect Joe Biden has proposed a $15,000 tax credit for first-time homebuyers, which, if passed, will further spur buyer demand.

Mortgage interest rates will remain low. The National Association of Realtors expects that 30-year, fixed mortgage rates will remain stable or slightly increase in 2021 from the 50-year low of 2.71% in 2020.

Housing supply will lag. As sellers become more comfortable opening their homes to buyers, there will be a rise in available listings. However, new home construction is expected to be restrained due to “a shortage of lots, labor and building materials,” according to National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Chairman Chuck Fowke. Affordability and the gap in the cost of living across the U.S. will continue to be a problem, especially in areas where housing is in high demand and fewer new homes are being built.

Home buyers will move to the suburbs. The long standing trend of moving from rural areas to the city is changing. More people are leaving cities due to high costs and aging infrastructure. Additionally, the pandemic provided the ability for many people to work from home. More people are retreating to suburbs and rural areas, something that will likely continue in 2021.

House size will continue to grow. The average single-family home size in America almost doubled in the last century to more than 2,430 square feet in 2020, even as the average number of people living in a house fell from 4.54 people to 2.58 people. On the other hand, the typical rental unit size in a metropolitan area shrank by 5%, though rents increased by 28%. These dynamics drive the appeal of suburban and rural residence for city dwellers. Another factor of the growth of house sizes is the possibility of making more profit on a home sale.

Technology access and use will be necessary home features. Advances in technology have changed the ways Americans work, play, learn, and communicate. Houses in neighborhoods or areas that lack access to high-speed internet are increasingly avoided by new home buyers. 

Buying and selling a home traditionally requires significant physical effort, time, and expense to locate potential candidates, negotiate transaction terms, and process closings. Today’s home buyers and sellers have access to extensive information about city and neighborhood demographic information, specific houses for sale, and market prices without leaving their homes. 

Continue reading “Real Estate Market Predictions for 2021”

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” – Mark Twain

My name is Jay Ferguson and I am one of the owners of the real estate division of Taylor Made Deep Creek Vacations & Sales. I am entering my 19^th year in the real estate business here in Garrett County and at Deep Creek Lake. If you are interested, you can click here find out more about me personally and my background.

I will be writing a monthly blog post about our local real estate market, sharing & interpreting statistics and offering some insights into the market as a whole…as I see it. These are my personal thoughts and musings about the market in general and are not intended as anything more specific. And, to be clear, I am an optimistic, glass half-full kind of guy.  

Lastly, every stat I reference is based on the official stats published by Bright MLS on or around the 15^th of each month. My plan is to give you straightforward stats coupled with my analysis from the front lines and let you interpret what you read in your own way.

Look back at the last 6 months of real estate sales, the Garrett County area squeezed almost two years of sales into a few summer months and the results are shocking. I personally experienced a level of activity that I have never witnessed in my 21 years of real estate sales. In speaking with other agents in the lake area and even across the region, they were all reporting the same thing – real estate was on fire. There truly were not enough hours in the day to answer all of the questions and keep up with the activity. The market has now slowed down enough now to look back on the summer/fall season of 2020 and share some insights and try to make sense of what happened. And it bears stating, the only reason that the market has slowed down is because homeowners stopped listing properties for sale. More on that later.

Who was/is buying?

-Traditional vacationers who have experienced & love Deep Creek Lake & Garrett County

-Investors looking at rising rental rates

-Tele-commuters and remote workforce

-Re-locating families

-Buyers coming from a much farther distance – New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Texas!

The first two categories are what we are used to. People who have vacationed here and know the area and have been planning to buy here one day or retire here – and buyers interested in leveraging their vacation home into a rental property. That is who typically fuels our market. The interesting thing to note is that other types of buyers were purchasing here, as well, and that’s where the inventory issues started to set in.

If you work from home now or only need to visit the office sporadically, that is a fundamental life change for a lot of folks. For the first time, though, I think a lot of people started to realize that they can live almost anywhere now, so why not look around for a more suitable option. Garrett County checked that box for a lot of people. Part of this group includes buyers who were coming here for the first time – albeit out of necessity. It is not uncommon to see New York, New Jersey and Connecticut license plates here, but now there a lot more of them.

There were also people who were capitalizing on the hot real estate market (back home) and selling their primary home to permanently re-locate to Garrett County. This one intrigues me the most, as Garrett County didn’t need to land a new Amazon distribution center or add a huge factory to bring these folks to the area. No, these people moved here because the perception was its safer and they could still keep a higher paying job in the city. A silver lining of the pandemic is that people now can live where they love – and DCL has a lot to love, apparently!

If you combine this with our booming vacation rental market – which was nearly 100% capacity for most of the summer – it drove more traffic to our area than EVER before and I think a lot of people realized just how rewarding owning here could be. Record profits for homeowners. Homes rented back to back ALL summer long. With all of these people in town, homes sold at such a breakneck pace that we have quite literally run out of properties to sell. The figures below put this in context. A ‘normal’ month in Garrett County is 25-30 property sales, higher in the summer months when more people are here. May 2020 was artificially low because of the stay at home orders. You can see what happened when the restrictions were lifted.

Continue reading “December 2020 Real Estate Rundown By Jay Ferguson”

Lake Title, LLC is the newest addition to Taylor-Made’s full service Deep Creek Lake real estate division. Offering competitive rates, it is one more way that we are making transactions smoother for buyers and sellers

With the closing of another local title company, we identified a void in marketplace. Our agents have numerous real estate transactions. In order to best serve clients, this was a natural next step in Taylor-Made’s “one-stop-shop” approach.

We are thrilled to have David R. Collins join the team as our attorney. He is licensed in Maryland and West Virginia. His background includes more than ten years in litigation, real estate, and appeals in West Virginia. Mr. Collins graduated from West Virginia University College of Law, where he served as Publications Editor for the West Virginia Law Review. Prior to attending law school, Mr. Collins worked for the Preservation Directorate at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. 

Continue reading “Lake Title: Taylor-Made’s New Sister Company”