It is not unusual these days to see people living on a boat.
Some folks rent or buy a concrete pad and call a motorhome like the Tiffin Phaeton 40 QSH home.
The Tiffin happens to come in at a wallet busting $216,200. It comes with a walk around queen bed and a garden tub.
It is actually sells for more than the last house I sold.
I guess if you don't have a regular home, and you have decided you want to be mobile, the Tiffin is just one of the options that buyers see today.
When I work with buyers in our area, I often tell them that I can show them basically very similar homes at $300K, $400K, and over $500K. The price just depends on how close to the water and what type of water the house is near.
We then have mobile homes which start at around eighty thousand unless they are also near the water. Then we have homes which start about where the mobile leave off or around $160K and run to whatever you're willing to pay based on features.
As in most real estate markets, along the coast we can say that we have plenty of inventory. Roanoke is doing better than most markets, but here in the Emerald Isle area, there have been up to 1,200 properties on the market.
My sense of the real estate market is that a number of people are pulling their properties from the market. Some are putting them in long term rentals. Others are just looking at not selling.
I read today that the first baby boomer is now collecting Social Security. It will be interesting to see how this changes the dynamics of the real estate market.
My sense is that the problem in our area is no longer prices which are too. What we are facing is buyers looking at an uncertain future and waiting on the sidelines until they feel comfortable the market has sorted itself out.
This has given us a deficit of buyers which results from a lack of confidence in the market.
