Home buyers, how fearful are you?
Pending sales are up - but so are cancellations
There has been a modest bump in sales activity - in Massachusetts and across the country - as we head into December.
Pending home sales posted a 5.2 percent, year-over-year increase in November, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors reports. There were initial sales contracts inked on 3,580 homes last month.
That mirrors the 10.4 percent jump in pending sales across the country the National Association of Realtors recently crowed about.(Though, to be clear, that was a month-over-month increase, as in October over September, raising some basic seasonal issues with those numbers.)
Yet how many of these deals will make it to the closing table?
Well a surprising number - as much as 20 percent nationally - won't get that far, notes CNBC's Diana Olick.
That's "way up from the historic norm of around four to six percent," she writes, citing another set of numbers that NAR puts out related to sales that are delayed or fall through.
More surprisingly, according to Olick, were the reasons given by Realtors for the sales that collapsed in the final stages. Just 9 percent cited buyers having problems getting mortgages, with cold feet, failed inspections and a tough economy looming as larger reasons.
So buyers, how committed are you to closing? What would prompt you to walk away after initially agreeing to buy a house?
