Listings surge expected as real estate work resumes

Karen Schnelle would have put the family farm in Butler County up for sale in March, but the COVID-19 pandemic put the brakes on those plans.

The 185-acre farm in Prospect hit the market Wednesday, listed for sale at $1.25 million.

Like many people reluctant to list their homes for sale while real estate agents in the state were unable to show properties to potential buyers, Mrs. Schnelle waited until after Gov. Tom Wolf’s executive order allowed real estate agents and others in the industry to go back to work on May 15.

Buyers for homes and other properties could expect to see a spike in new listings coming to the market in June.

That’s good news for house hunters in the Pittsburgh region because the number of homes available for sale at any given time has been falling in recent years, regularly leading to multiple losers on a bid. The recent real estate shutdown, which lasted for two months, made inventory even tighter.

“I see things changing right now in real time,” said Mike Netzel, operating partner at Keller Williams Realty, who oversees the company’s

Shadyside office. “Artificial lows tend to be followed by artificial highs, and at some point, things normalize.”

Mr. Netzel said his team of agents will bring $4 million worth of real estate to the market next week in communities that include McCandless, Bellevue, Avalon, Ross and Highland Park.

Coldwell Banker real estate agent Bobby West, based in Squirrel Hill, said he has 15 houses he will be listing for sale this month in neighborhoods that include Lawrenceville, Stanton Heights, the North Hills, Bethel Park, Mount Washington and Sewickley. He typically lists about six or seven homes a month.

“For me, it’s been incredibly busy,” Mr. West said. “When I’m scheduling house tours for my buyers, many houses already have more than one offer.”

Mr. Netzel believes June could be a pivot point. “When you bottle people up for 60 days, what does that cause? You find out your house is not as big or as quiet as it used to be. A lot of people got an awareness of the things they are looking for in a home that their current home doesn’t have. And they want to buy, but they must sell the home they’re in first.”

‘Selling very quickly’

Demand for housing in this region remains so strong that nearly 35% of the new listings added to the West Penn Multi-List since real estate operations reopened May 15 have either sold or are under contract.

There were 2,833 homes listed in the two weeks after real estate was reopened, and 983 of them — or 35% — have either been sold or are under contract. By comparison, only 1,684 homes — or half the May listings — came onto the market in January.

“Our concern was that people might not want to sell homes in this market, but they are certainly embracing it,” said Tom Hosack, president of West Penn Multi-List and CEO of the Berkshire Hathaway real estate company.

“The homes that are out there are selling very quickly. Homes are getting multiple offers and at very high prices. This is a sign that the public is ready to go back to normal.”

The housing shortage is actually a national phenomenon, not just a Pittsburgh dilemma, according to the National Association of Realtors in Washington, D.C. The trade group said past housing shortages have usually occurred in coastal regions, such as California, Massachusetts, New York and Washington, D.C.

It’s rare to see housing shortages in middle America cities like Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Mo. One factor contributing to the housing shortage is subpar home construction activity over the past decade. By some estimates, the inventory of homes for sale on the market is 30% to 50% below normal.

Sluggish market for higher price ranges

How quickly a home sells in this region has a lot to do with the price range.

Kim Marie Angiulli, a Coldwell Banker real estate agent who sells higher-end properties, said she recently closed on the sale of a home in the Heights of North Park for more than $1 million, and she has another one under contract in the Lake

Macleod neighborhood in Pine listed for $1.5 million. But she acknowledges the market is not as robust for homes in the higher price ranges because the pool of buyers is smaller.

“For homes in the $650K to $850K range, that market is a little sluggish,” Ms. Angiulli said. “Homes in the $400K range go fairly fast. But homes priced between $200K and $400K are literally flying off the market. We get multiple offers and bidding wars on those.”

More first-time buyers are attracted to homes in the $200,000 to $400,000 range, she said. Those buyers can qualify for loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration or the Veterans Administration. FHA will finance homes for as little as 3.5% down. The VA requires no money down.

Still a sellers’ market

With unemployment rates soaring during the COVID-19 crisis and job cuts impacting nearly every industry, you would think there would be fewer people in a position to buy homes. But, for now, there are still more buyers than sellers.

“We still have a lot of people employed in Pittsburgh, and a lot of people are moving in,” said Jeannine Mullen, a real estate agent with ReMax. “I have local move-up buyers and people who are expanding their families or gotten promotions at work.

“Some of my buyers are retiring, and they want to downsize,” she said. “Many are local, but some are moving here from other cities, or they are doing residencies at the hospitals. I work with a lot of physicians.”

Georgie Smigel, a Coldwell Banker real estate agent who works out of Cranberry, said some of the sellers she is working with are downsizing in retirement or moving to other states to either retire or accept new jobs. Some are upgrading from condos to single-family homes.

Ms. Smigel said her team closed 29 sales in the month of May in communities that include Cranberry, Mars, Lawrenceville and neighborhoods throughout the North Hills.

“Depending on the price and condition, if it’s a great home, we continue to get multiple offers,” she said. “But I will say if a house is overpriced, it will sit.

Pittsburgh buyers are pretty savvy about values.”

The family farm

The market for farms is a little harder to predict than that for homes. And the timing of a listing generally has more to do with personal issues than pandemics.

Since her mother died in 2018, Mrs. Schnelle, 68, has been busy organizing personal items at her family’s Butler County home and cleaning up the place.

It’s the place where her earliest childhood memories were made. Her parents bought the land and worked it with their own hands. She was raised there from the time she was 1 until marrying her husband, Ron, at age 21.

Her father died in 2008. Her mother moved into assisted living in 2013. Out of respect for her mother and the memory of her father, she didn’t sell while her mother was alive because her mother would occasionally want to visit the property.

“It was a great place to grow up,” Mrs. Schnelle said.