Letter to the Editor Criticizes Agents’ Take on Florida Housing Market
Are we in a housing slump or aren’t we? Both sellers and Florida home mortgage applicants would like a definitive answer to this question.
While there’s no straightforward answer, at least one reader of The Palm Beach Post took exception to recent views and accusations by real estate agents around the state. Here’s a paraphrasized version of his Letter to the Editor.
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I’m not looking to sell my home, so, while it was with interest that I read the Oct. 1 article regarding the upwardly spiraling insurance costs to homeowners (”Nobody’s market”), there was one sentence that grabbed my attention. It was: “Realtors now hope that area home sellers finally are facing reality after months of denial that plummeting sales and ballooning inventories foretold a weaker market.”
It leaves one with a number of questions that deserve to be asked:
- Are we to suddenly forget that it was Realtors themselves who for months (as recently as last month) have been denying to The Post an impending crisis with the potential decline in the home sales market?
- Is there not a good deal of hypocrisy in this claim?
- When did the issue become a matter of purely “the sellers”” denial?”
Can anybody name one real estate agent who bucked the trend of silence about what was a growing reality for months, even a year or so, with a public “warning” of the impending Florida housing market downturn? Can anybody point to any warning at all from the realty “leadership” of what was about to occur?
After all, it’s not as though rising tax costs and the insurance issue have been a secret for at least a couple of years, if not more. These have contributed to the costs of a Florida home mortgage loan.
Was there even a single voice from among the thousands of South Florida realtors warning homeowners, buyers and sellers about the impending fallout when Florida mortgage rates began to go up? Or have we been witness to something akin to a conspiracy of silence that was allowed to reign until the obvious no longer could be denied and someone had to be blamed?
One is left with one conclusion and one more question: The same real estate people who for years were the primary catalyst for “investors” to get into the home-buying frenzy now are blaming home sellers for not appreciating the realities of the marketplace.
What does it say about their “profession?”
