Posted on May - 01 - 2010
Tax credit pressed real estate agents down to the wire
Spurred by Friday’s deadline for claiming an $8,000 tax credit, a prospective buyer made an offer at 1 p.m. Thursday on a Southwind home.
The seller “met them halfway” on the 3,900-square-foot, zero-lot-line house that borders a Southwind TPC fairway and listed for $379,000, said Crye-Leike agent Christie May.
But by midmorning Friday, the would-be buyer had yet to respond.
“We’re waiting to see what they’re going to do,” May said.
It’s been a hectic week for a lot of Realtors.
Another Crye-Leike agent, Patty Rainey, said she worked until 7:30 and 8:30 most nights this week.
“Last night was the first time all week long I got home at 6,” she said Friday.
For months it has been common knowledge that first-time home-buyers needed a purchase agreement in hand by midnight Friday to claim the $8,000 tax credit.
The public tends to procrastinate, Rainey said.
“I was working four contracts yesterday,” she said.
A more modest tax credit was available for existing homeowners, too. They could buy a new home and claim up to a $6,500 credit. But that incentive never seemed to spur much activity.
“I don’t think it was completely understood,” Rainey said.
“It hasn’t incentivized,” May said.
Maybe it was too hard selling their existing homes in a buyers’ market. Homeowners may have thought they would lose more than the credit was worth, May said.
Since existing homeowners generally would be moving up into more expensive homes, perhaps the $6,500 didn’t help enough.
But just because the credits have vanished doesn’t mean good deals have, Rainey said.
Realtors, she said, “are worried the public will step back now that the credit is expiring and not take advantage of low interest rates and great prices.”
It remains as much as a buyers’ market as Rainey has seen in her 29 years in real estate.
– Tom Bailey Jr.: 529-2388
Similar Posts:
- Memphis-based French & Company Realtors merges into Crye-Leike
- It’s an open house weekend
- Ways Of Buying Foreclosed And Bank Owned Properties
- Builder of the week: Gardens of Gray’s Hollow fits lifestyle of the modern family
- Countdown to tax credit deadline spurs homebuying activity
