Focus on the Current Real Estate Market-Not the Previous One
Professionally photographed picture of our staged living room when we prepared the house for selling May 2025.
When we relocated to Austin from Idaho in 2017, the housing market in Austin was hot! I made a list of homes to tour, sent the list to my real estate agent at the time (Linda Miller now with Christie’s Brokerage), boarded a plane, and checked in to my hotel. By the time I woke up the next morning, most of the homes were already under contract. My list of 6 homes dwindled down to two. The home we ended up purchasing hadn’t even gone on the market but was listed as “coming soon”. Zero pictures on the MLS or on Zillow.
When I toured the home, the sellers were still packing up and preparing to have it listed. I took photos of the house to be able to compare it to the other home I was touring that day but they were not Instagram worthy! Besides the packing aesthetic currently displayed in the home, the floor plan and bedroom to bathroom ratio was exactly what we were looking for at the time so we put in an offer.
Fast forward to 2025 when we were selling that home to move to one that better fit our growing family’s needs. I worked with Lisa Roberts now with the Bramlett Partners brokerage and we spent a full week preparing to list our home. We touched up the paint on our baseboards, filled every nail hole, and only kept basic furniture in the home for staging. The rules of the real estate game had changed!
Similarly, this year the most busy time of home buying and selling has been different from previous hot market periods. In the current Austin real estate market, buyers can by choosy-they do not have to grab a house before it is officially listed on the MLS. Which means sellers have a lot more work up front to do in order to attract buyers. Having lived (and bought and sold houses) through both eras, I can identify with the pain that current home sellers have in preparing a home to sell. But embracing the current housing market and playing by its’ rules will be a lot less frustrating than trying to apply the rules of a housing market of the past.
Cell phone photo of the living room of the house we ended up buying that was “coming soon”. The home owners were preparing the house for listing and were still actively packing the house when we came to tour it in 2017.