With St. Cloud housing activity up and down, one impactful facet remains: there still aren’t enough properties to choose from. To many, this fact is a downer: a drag on home sales totals, an impediment to buyers who face stubborn seller's market asking prices, and a stubborn roadblock to many would-be homeowners whose incomes won’t quite stretch.

But (as the old saying goes) in adversity lurks opportunity. When it comes to how that might apply to St. Cloud housing, The National Association of Realtors^® spelled it out in last month’s Real Estate News article. The advice was intended for their readership—the nation’s brokers and agents—but “4 Property Investment Opportunities Created by the Downturn” can be equally enlightening for their clients.  

The piece isolated four main points that should be of interest to anyone eyeing today’s housing market:

1.      Baby Boomers are Leaving Behind Fixer-Uppers. True enough—and there are an awful lot of Boomers who are ready to downsize after a lifetime of maintaining properties that are now too spacious for their emptier nests. The statistics are convincing: “Homes between 20 and 39 years old are becoming in need of significant repairs”—and there are 25,000,000 of them. For enterprising investors, more hardly need to be said.

2.      Single-Family Rentals are in Demand. A growing number of would-be homeowners may have to wait to buy, but many of them have outgrown apartment living and are turning to the rental housing market. Investors are “buying in up-and-coming areas just outside…cities, flipping them and renting them.”

3.      iBuyers Have Left the Neighborhood. Many of those formerly hot companies have failed to become profitable (bad luck in timing was often the culprit). Their exit spells opportunity for smaller firms and individual investors.

4.      Expect More Distressed Inventory. One of the basic tenets for the ‘in adversity lurks opportunity’ believers is the advantage to be gained by appraising the current situation “from the future”—to see where it’s headed, and where perceptive investors will have positioned themselves.

For those who have thus far assumed that the current St. Cloud housing market presents few opportunities, the NAR research calls attention to the investment potential that exists even now. Call me to discuss the future those ideas anticipate…not to mention what’s out there right now!   

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