There’s nothing wrong with Jack and Paula Taylor’s house. It’s got a good neighborhood, a swimming pool, plenty of room.
What it doesn’t have is a buyer. After 18 months and four near-closings, the Taylors’ house has yet to sell.
“We knew we were taking some risks,” Paula Taylor said. “The realtors said it could take three to four months to sell the house. We thought, ‘OK, we can take three to four months.’”
Instead, they hit an Emporia housing market that some realtors say is now at its slowest point in years.
“Inventory is pretty steady, but buyers are few and far between,” said Judy Turner of Farm and Home Real Estate.
It’s not something that shows up right away in the statistics. The average closing time, according to Patrick Werly at Prudential Emporia Realtors, is about 75 days. That’s right in the middle of the classic 60-to-90 day period cited by most realtors.
It also has an awful lot of exceptions.
“We have several examples that have been out there for six months,” Werly said.
Maurice Schmidt of Ek Real Estate said a real estate slowdown isn’t that surprising.
“This is to be expected, as over the last 12 to 14 years, we have seen real estate values double, we have seen property taxes double, we have seen insurance rates double, we have seen electric rates double and we have seen natural gas rates double,” Schmidt said. “And what has made the summer of 2006 especially challenging is the fact that we had extended excessive heat and we have experienced $3-a-gallon gasoline, which really takes a toll on blue-collar America’s paycheck.”
Werly agreed that higher gas prices and tighter paychecks have a lot to do with it.
“There’s just less discretionary income to spend on mortgages,” he said. “It’s just affected everything.”
The Taylors put their home on the market just before Hurricane Katrina hit and gas prices spiked. Since then, they’ve found out how hard it is to break out of a slow market when everyone else is in the same boat. Twice, a potential buyer had to back out because their own home had failed to sell. A third would-be buyer lost his loan after losing his job.
The most recent attempt was a little quirkier. Buyer No. 4 was moving from another state and changed his mind after his wife decided she didn’t want to live in Kansas, Paula Taylor said.
“The whole time you’re thinking, ‘Is this really going to close? Is this really going to close?’” she said. “This last one, we didn’t let ourselves get excited until the day before.”
At the lowest price ranges, $50,000 to $100,000, first-time homebuyer money can still help push things along. But in the Taylors’ range, the homes between $150,000 and $200,000, things are decidedly slow.
As things have cooled off, Schmidt said, a number of real-estate agents have gotten out of the business.
“Our local real estate industry has lost approximately 10 percent of the people who were licensed,” he said. “When business gets tough, the pie gets smaller. There just aren’t as many pieces to go around.”
Some of the trouble is psychological, Turner said.
“When you turn the TV on and they say ‘There’s a slowdown,’ people say, ‘Oh, we’d better sit back and wait a bit,’” she said.
Of course, selling a house relies a little on psychology, too — the neatly raked yard, say, or the nice flowerpot by the street. But sometimes, Turner said, even that’s not enough.
“When they’ve got that street appeal and it’s not moving, there’s not much you can do,” she said.
In August, the median selling price for U.S. homes fell for the first time in 11 years, according to a report by the National Association of Realtors. The report also said the country has 3.92 million homes on the market, the most since 1993.
Fall tends to be a slow time of year for home sales anyway, so it may be spring before things push upward again. But Emporia has seen worse than this, Schmidt said.
“I was in the business when Emporia experienced the exit of the Wolf Creek construction workers and the Santa Fe Railroad ... and the resulting downturn in the market was complicated further by 18 percent home loan rates,” Schmidt said. “In no way do I anticipate anything like we experienced in the mid-to-late ’80s.”
Meanwhile, the Taylors know that things will break their way eventually.
“We just know the right people will come along,” Paula Taylor said. “And it’ll be a good house for whoever does.”