What are the most expensive per square foot homes in America?

According to a recent study recently done by REALTOR.com San Jose Santa Clara had the most expensive per square foot averages across the country.

Drum roll — $1,500 a square foot, not far behind are San Francisco and Oakland with $1,200 a square foot.

Now what's the least expensive in the country? Least expensive is Decatur, Illinois at $102 and Youngstown, Ohio at $120 a square foot.

There's a big discrepancy between the two.

The reason I bring this up is because we need to know what our average per square foots are in our local market. And it's going to change by subdivision. It's going to change by micro markets. But overall, you need to know what your county averages are and then your subcategories in different market segments. That way you can speak to this as an expert.

The other thing you need to be able to do is bring these into a conversation with buyers and...

Affordability is on the tip of everybody's tongues right now.

Why is affordability so important?

Well, it's a measurement of how affordable it is for the average person in America to own a home.

NAR has studied this every single month and they gave us a Home Affordability Graph. And you might expect this, but home affordability has actually been going up because of something substantial, which is interest rates going down.

As interest rates go down, affordability goes up.

That's despite the fact that we've had actually super fast rising prices, right? Prices starting to go into double digit territory across the country. And then we see interest rates going down, which pushes affordability up.

But because home prices have gotten so high recently, that's actually starting to level off and come back down. But we recently had another upswing. So we're measuring a few things when we look at affordability.

When NAR looks at...

Something super exciting happened in the last month that we haven't seen in the last 15 years:

Home prices on existing homes exceeded home prices for new homes.

Think about what I just said:

Existing home prices exceeded new home construction. So it was actually cheaper to go buy a brand new house nobody had ever lived in than buying an existing home. Absolutely amazing.

Lots of reasons behind that. But one of the reasons is normally when you're buying new construction, you're locking in a price six months earlier. And then they complete the new construction and you move in.

Well, the market has super accelerated in those last 6 months. And guess what's also happened:

Now, if you were to try to pull that off, what's happened with all kinds of lumber, supplies, and even appliances?

Prices have gone up.

So this will probably not be repeated anytime soon because now prices on new construction are beginning to rise again.

But what...

What percentage of Americans would you guess paid off their home?

Think about that for a second: Completely own their home, free and clear.

In other words, when you're driving down the street in your neighborhood, out of 10 homes, how many people have paid their home off and outright own it?

Would it be 2 homes, 3 homes, 4 homes?

The answer is 38% of Americans have paid off their home in full, which is absolutely amazing.

The equity for homes in America is off the charts. It's incredible. So that's good.

Now, why do I bring this up?

The reason I bring it up is because people that have equity in their home actually have a huge, powerful advantage when it comes to moving up to their dream home.

And here's why:

They can actually do something that a lot of sellers can't. They could go buy a home and finance their second home (what they're going to buy next). And they won't have two mortgages.

So they have no pressure on themselves when it...

Sometimes a seller will say to you, "Well, just sell it to a cash buyer. I don't want to deal with financing."

Have you heard that? We all have from time to time. When you have a seller say that to you, you need to arm yourself with good information so you counter that. And help them understand that the market isn't comprised of a ton of cash buyers.

The good news is that there are more cash buyers that there has been. We've seen a huge uptake in cash buyers. But the current number as of today, in all across the country, is that 25% of the sales done in the country are now cash buyers.

But what's the reverse of that number? The reverse of that number is 75% of the sales are not cash sales. So they're involving some level of financing. Which means that when we list a property, we have to sell it four times in order to create a sale.

We have to sell it to the market, to get them excited about that listing. That's creating that...

We've just had some excellent news about where homeowners' heads are regarding selling their home.

The latest study shows that 67% of homeowners believe today is a good time to sell, which is one of the record highs we've seen with this kind of thought process.

But when we go deeper into those numbers, according to Realtor.com, it shows this:

1 in 10 homeowners plan to sell this year. 1 in 10!

Think about that when you're driving home tonight and you're driving through your neighborhoods. 1 in 10 of these homes that you're driving by is going to be listed in the next year!

But here's something that's even more exciting:

63% of those are going to be listing their home in the next six months.

The only question is... Who are they going to list with? Is it going to be with you or your competitor?

And if it's your competitor, why did they get the listing when you missed out? The reason is they did one thing that you didn't do:...

An interesting new study came out from Zillow recently that talked about what people's attitudes are related to working from home versus working in an office after COVID ends.

What's interesting is that 95% of the American population would prefer to work partly at home and partly at the office after COVID ends.

So big, big differences in how people want to work going forward. But even deeper than that — 36% of the population now prefers to work at home. So basically one third of Americans say they don't want to go back to an office after COVID ends. They just stay working remotely.

What does that mean for housing and real estate? Well, a couple of things:

It means that our trend, which has been trending towards smaller houses for a long time pre-COVID has reversed. Now we're trending towards larger homes where people can work from home, go to school from home, and really have multi-generational families in some cases where...

There's a question that we've had for a while now, which is: When are listing is going to come back in full force?

When can we have that expectation that we're going to start to see listings en masse start to come back to the marketplace?

We know there's been hesitancy because of COVID, but now that people are getting vaccines and the economy is strong. So when are we going to start to see people coming back and saying, Hey, I'm ready to make a sale. I'm ready to make a change.

There's an answer for us.

Zillow just did an extensive study talking to industry experts across the country. And the consensus is that it's going to be in the second half of 2021.

So we're coming right up onto that pretty soon here. And we're going to be right in the middle of 2021, which means we're going to start to see an acceleration of listings.

The question is: Are you ready for it? Are you out there lead generating to start stacking up that business now?

So here...