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Selling a home these days isn’t as effortless as a year ago, when a seller could choose among competing buyers.

“Overall, I’d say the buying/selling experience right now is comparable to the summer of 2019,” Dana Bull, a Realtor in the Boston area, said in an email. Today, “there’s still low inventory and it’s a very active market, but not as cutthroat and without underlying tones of desperation.”

Last year’s home-selling advice consisted largely of tips for choosing the best offer. But those recommendations have grown stale: Homes are receiving fewer offers amid slowing sales.

Sellers need fresh guidance. Buyers are taking more time, and they’re getting picky. Here are home-selling suggestions from real estate agents.

Higher rates = fewer buyers and fewer offers

It’s still a seller’s market, in which would-be buyers outnumber sellers, but it isn’t as imbalanced as it used to be, because mortgage rates skyrocketed this year and pushed homes past the point of affordability for some. The result is fewer home sales.

Homes are also taking longer to sell: According to real estate brokerage Redfin, 61.2% of homes for sale in July were on the market at least 30 days, compared with 54.4% in July 2021.

Sellers felt confident of getting multiple offers in 2021, but they receive fewer offers now. Homes for sale in June received an average of 3.4 offers, down from 4.4 offers in June 2021, according to the National Association of Realtors’ monthly Confidence Index.

Not long ago, it was common to list a property on Tuesday and sell it by the weekend, says Terri Robinson, a Realtor in Ashburn, Virginia. “Or you had people putting in offer deadlines saying, ‘Please submit all offers by 4 p.m. Sunday.’ Now that language has disappeared.”

Here’s the time-honored way to sell a house:

That strategy isn’t ideal when selling to today’s first-time buyers.

“Home buyers will ignore homes which are perceived as overpriced,” Chuck Vander Stelt, a Realtor in Valparaiso, Indiana, said in an email. This is especially true of millennial and Generation Z buyers, he said, who are more comfortable viewing and making offers on houses for which the sellers have set a “justifiable price.”

Michelle Doherty, a Realtor in northern Virginia, notices the same thing. Buyers “hold off, thinking, ‘You know what? We’ll wait for them to drop [the price].'” She prods clients to make offers below asking instead of waiting for sellers to reduce prices. The worst that sellers can say is no, she points out.

Senior couple having meeting with financial advisor or insurance agent at home.

Pricing strategy is still fundamental

Keeping the above in mind, agents and their clients still set the asking price using traditional techniques: looking up prices of recent comparable sales, then making adjustments based on the home’s condition and the seller’s patience.

“If they need the proceeds to secure another home, they may be inclined to price on the low end of the range to ensure enough interest” and sell quickly, Bull said.

Bull added: “I tell my sellers that it’s OK to go with their ‘reach price’ but to be prepared to react to market feedback if the home is not selling. A price reduction often attracts a new set of buyers and can get those who are already considering the home at the original price to take action.”

More sellers are cutting their asking prices. Reductions almost doubled in one year, from 134,036 in June 2021 to 266,812 in June 2022, according to data from Realtor.com.

Buyers don’t want to inherit costly repairs

All these agents underscored the need to clean the house thoroughly, repaint or at least touch up, and beautify the outside. “I think that’s something we got away from for a long time,” Doherty says. If the seller doesn’t have time or money to make the place immaculate, she adds, “then you just have to price it in accordance with what the product looks like.”

But beauty is more than Sheetrock-deep to today’s buyers. After they make down payments, pay loan closing costs and spring for pizza for friends who helped them move, they want assurance that they won’t get torched by expensive repairs in the first two or three years, Vander Stelt said.

“Home sellers can get more for their homes if they can illustrate a low risk of the new owner having a major expense in the near future,” he said. He suggests hiring an inspector before listing the home, addressing issues that are identified, rehiring the inspector to prepare a report after repairs are made, then sharing the report with buyers.

Vander Stelt acknowledged that a seller these days is unlikely to recoup the cost of replacing a roof, furnace or water heater. But, he said, “When sellers remove all doubt, buyers react by making offers more quickly and typically pay a higher price.”

Bidding wars aren’t necessary

Sales success isn’t measured by the number of competing offers that a property attracts. One acceptable offer is enough.

“Yes, the market has changed,” Robinson says. “But more importantly, houses are still going under contract, and yours will, too. It may take a little bit longer, and we may get one or two offers versus the 10 or 15 that people were getting in the past. But the key here is that we’re getting the offers.”

Manufactured home sales are skyrocketing—here’s why

The last few years of ultra-competitive, low-inventory housing markets have pushed more Americans to buy small—and have spurred an uptick in the popularity of manufactured homes. In fact, manufactured housing hasn’t been this popular since 2006.

A manufactured home is a compact house small enough to be made in a factory. They can range from 500-2,000 square feet and tend to include all the typical home amenities found in a single-family home.

Americans lost interest in this more compact form of housing in the early 2000s when lenders were hyping subprime mortgages to single-family home buyers—a practice that ultimately triggered a housing market collapse. Through much of the 2010s, sales of manufactured homes remained low; however, in 2018, Bloomberg declared that manufactured housing was making a comeback.

Stacker examined data from the U.S. Census’ Manufactured Housing Survey to see how manufactured home prices and shipments have changed over the last eight years. In just five years since Bloomberg’s declaration, these types of homes have increased in price faster than single-family homes, as more and more Americans seek affordable housing options.

Manufactured homes are the country’s largest source of affordable, unsubsidized housing; however, rising prices and increasing investor activity are pricing many buyers out. It is also more difficult and costly to get a mortgage for a manufactured home than for a single-family home, according to research by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

After a boom in popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, the U.S. passed laws regulating how mobile homes were built and also bestowed the home type with its new name, which carried with it less of a connection to Hollywood depictions of trailer parks. The regulated industry of manufactured housing was born.

The standards for building a manufactured home today are comparable to those for building single-family homes. Some even argue these homes are built for more wear and tear than their single-family counterparts, given that they have to be sturdy enough to transport on highways either in pieces or in their entirety. They are generally 8 feet or more in width and 40 feet or more in length while in transit.

At the turn of the 21st century, Americans were buying fewer and fewer manufactured homes—until around 2013. That’s when annual shipments began ticking upward again, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Shipments of manufactured homes represent how many individual homes are built and delivered to buyers.

Although they decreased in 2020, likely due to the pandemic, shipments of manufactured homes bounced back with gusto in 2021 and 2022. In fact, 2022 saw the most shipments of manufactured homes since around 2006. 

As interest in manufactured homes has increased, so too has the cost of purchasing a manufactured home. That said, the average price of a new manufactured home is still much more affordable than the typical single-family home.

In 2021, the average price of a new manufactured home was $108,100, up 19.5% from the year before, according to U.S. Census data. The average single-family home in 2021 sold for nearly $454,000.

Manufactured housing is becoming more expensive at a faster rate than single-family homes. This was especially true from 2020-2021. Some of the spike in costs during this period can be attributed to supply chain hiccups amid the COVID-19 pandemic and higher costs for materials like lumber. But manufactured home prices had been increasing faster than single-family home prices even before the pandemic began—and at least as far back as 2017.

The cost of purchasing a manufactured home in the U.S. jumped the most in North Dakota and Minnesota, which respectively saw a 49% and 46% rise in prices.

North Dakota Manufactured Housing Association Director Kent French said the trend of Americans moving to more rural regions of the country as employers embrace remote work has been a boon for the industry.

“To get a carpenter to go out and build your house is almost non-existent in the rural areas,” French said. But anyone can plop down a pre-built manufactured home on a remote plot of land—if they can afford it.

Consolidation among businesses that produce manufactured housing means that prices can swing more dramatically from month to month compared with single-family homes. That’s according to French, who told Stacker that prices have been coming down in his state in recent months as lumber and other goods become cheaper.

The average sales price of these homes decreased from 2020-2021 in three states: Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.

It’s not just manufactured home prices that are going up—the cost of renting the lot a manufactured home sits on has been increasing as well. Midwestern states saw the largest increases in manufactured housing tenant occupancy, according to data from Northmarq. The average rent for a lot increased 4.4% nationwide in 2021.

But corporate landlords have also been expanding their manufactured housing portfolios recently, pushing up rents and displacing some residents. The largest operator of manufactured home communities in the U.S. is Equity LifeStyle Properties, a real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns around 140,000 lots across 446 properties. 

Combined, these factors push up the total rent cost for Americans seeking affordable housing options.

The article Suddenly, the Housing Market Is Not All About the Sellers originally appeared on NerdWallet.

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