Inman Connect
This is the second installment of Inman’s five-part Bubble Trouble series on the housing market’s unpredictable rise.
Tom Bailey became a real estate agent in 2008 as the housing market was going from really good to really bad. It wasn’t easy.
Tom Bailey
“I did everything,” Bailey, a broker with Margaret Rudd & Associates in Southport, North Carolina, recently told Inman. “I was calling expired listings. Calling [for-sale-by-owner listings]. I’d get out and knock on doors.”
More than a decade later, Bailey’s then-fledgling career has survived and conditions are very different. Before, inventory was abundant. Now it’s tight. Before, many consumers had little equity in their homes. Now, most people put down 20 percent. And overall, despite ever-rising prices, most economists don’t currently think that the housing market is about to fall off a cliff.