Cooper: Housing Market Swings Toward Sellers

The Indiana realty manager for Berkshire Hathaway Home Services says the state’s housing market has changed dramatically over the last 24-36 months. "New construction is ramping up," says Greg Cooper. "We’re getting a lot of new home choices for consumers and a lot of properties that have been dated and somewhat obsolete are getting flipped and redone and re-entering the marketplace." He says nearly a decade after the housing bubble burst, for the most part, it continues to be a seller’s market in Indiana.

During an interview on a special edition of Inside INdiana Business Television focusing on the state’s housing market, Cooper discussed the outlook for the remainder of 2017. "We’re going to see a slow escalation of home mortgage rates, in addition to the general cost of borrowing money going to get a little more expensive," he said. "That may not be a terrible, terrible thing in the respect that we would go from a hardcore seller’s market in many cases to perhaps where buyers and sellers are doing it a little bit more out of necessity, instead of simply: there’s an opportunity."

Cooper also cautions buyers and sellers alike that cases of wire fraud are cropping up throughout the home purchase process. He says hackers have been discovered gaining access to email accounts, then using documents found in a victim’s inbox to change routing numbers during transactions and send the money to their own accounts.