Home buyers navigate tight housing market as prices rise | Economy
A Madison couple achieved the dream shared by so many: they bought their first house. But they faced their own share of ups and downs.
MADISON (WKOW) — A new report from the Wisconsin Realtors Association (WRA) shows that housing supply remains tight in Wisconsin.
The report, released Thursday, contains data through November of 2023.
It found that existing home sales fell 3.4% last month when compared to November of 2022.
Only about three month supply of housing is available, about half the amount for what is generally considered a balanced market.
New listings grew by 7.2%, the second month in a row that the number of options on the market increased.
The median price for a home rose 7.7% to $280,000.
First time home buyers and their realtors are trying to navigate this market to realize the important milestone of homeownership.
Zack Wegner and his wife Kirsten have a lot of work to do on their new Madison house to make it a home for their dogs Witten and Cecil.
They are first time home buyers who spent three months on the market.
“It’s a weight off your shoulders, for sure to find the one,” Zack said standing in his new living room. “It was a tough process just to figure out what we wanted.”
The couple looked at about a half dozen homes, and they went through their share of heartbreak in the search.
“We had one rejection,” Kirsten said. “We negotiated with our Oregon house that we first fell in love with. It didn’t work out, unfortunately.”
But they love the home they ended up with on the city’s west side, even if it needs work. The couple are in the process of stripping wallpaper, replacing trim, painting and tackling a long list of other to-dos.
The couple said that despite all of the ups and downs of their story, they think that they learned that the need qualities in any perspective home buyer in this market are patience and persistence.
That’s advice echoed by Abby Benbow, the couple’s realtor from First Weber.
“We are still seeing bidding wars, even in what we consider an off season between the holidays here,” Benbow said of the Madison market. “There’s a lot of competition.”
And in a tight housing market she advises clients not to let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
“The house that Kirsten and Zack bought, it wasn’t perfect,” Benbow said. “It needed some work done, it needs a bathroom, and needs trim, needs paint. They get to make it their own.”
Frustrated
A new report shows that Wisconsin is facing a lack of housing supply. And one local man has spent years waiting for the perfect time to buy.
Colin Schilling, a renter living in Oregon, has been in and out of the housing market. He started looking for his first house in 2021 when interest rates were low.
He thought that would make it a good time to get a loan, but many other people had the same idea.
His realtor told him that he would have to make offers of $50,000 over asking price to have a shot at getting accepted. The rapidly rising prices cowed him out of the market. “Yeah, that’s way over budget,” he recalled himself saying at the time. “And [realtors] were like, ‘Sorry, you’re not gonna get that one, I guess.”
The competition drove prices too high. He stopped looking to buy and kept renting.
Now he’s taking tentative steps back into the market, but there are many fewer houses for sale.
One look at how prices had risen in Madison forced him to rethink his plans of buying in the city.
“That was thrown in the garbage immediately,” Schilling said. “I can’t live there.”
He next looked at the suburbs, and while those prices were closer to his range, he has limited options. He’s now looking at exurbs and small communities on the fringes of Dane County.
He hopes that an increase in listings will give him the options he needs to finally go from renting to owning.
Schilling has taken a lesson from his years-long wait.
“I think perseverance is the is the key here [in] the home search,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a easy. We’re in and out in 20 minutes.”
