Is there more balance in the housing market?

Because the housing market seems to be a little interesting versus what it's been for the last two
years, and everybody's been talking about the rates, everyone's been talking about how it's kind of
come to a standstill, I would argue that it's not a standstill, but now it's much more balanced for buyers.
And there's way more opportunity for buyers right now. In the past, sellers like to see buyers putting
20% down as part of the down payment. Now, historically, you don't need 20% down to buy a house,
but during the last two years of the pandemic, we had so much cash flowing into this economy, and so
many people had so much money that they were putting 20, 30, 40, 50% down, waving appraisals,
waving mortgages.
I would argue that right now, the last two months of the quarter, as we enter into the end of '22, it is a
great time for buyers that don't have 20% down, they can buy homes with 5% down, they can buy
homes with 3 1/2% down. All of my buyers that are using VA loans, it's an incredible time right now.
Because properties are sitting a little bit longer, it's giving buyers a lot more negotiating power. And part
of that negotiating power is the money down conversation because you can always refinance if you are
able to.
Interest rates are higher, so the less money you put down could affect your monthly payment, but the
argument on the other side of that is that you can always refinance. And you can shop the rates. You can
find smaller banks that would work with you to get more portfolio money that's still available. The
general consensus of this is that it is still a good time to buy because of the negotiating power buyers
now have. They did not have this power when we started the pandemic, it was bananas, and we've
talked about this ad nauseam. And every agent's talking about this, every agent on video's talking about
this, but it's important to really understand that buyers have some power right now. So you can use that
power, put less money down, get into a home, get out of renting. I mean, there's so many arguments for
the, "Let's keep looking, let's keep searching. Let's keep moving forward and buying a property today."