Buying a house seemingly never happens the same way twice.
In a buyer’s market, you may have lots of choices but there’s always the fear you’re taking on someone else’s problem and you never quite know if you should push your budget higher. Yes, you have lots of choices, but once you own a house during a buyer’s market, you have a possession that someone else struggled to sell.
That’s not a big problem if you intend to live there for a long time, but any homebuyer should acknowledge that life can sometimes interfere with intentions. You have to at least consider that the forever home you’re buying may end up as the place you live for no more than a few years.
When it’s a seller’s market — as it is right now — buyers have much less choice. The U.S., of course, isn’t one real estate market, and even when most of the country is one type of market, different areas may have different conditions.
For example, South Florida has been an incredibly hot market since the pandemic began, and while prices have somewhat stabilized, they have not fallen due to heavy demand.
