Ask Rogers Healy where the Dallas-Fort Worth residential real estate market is headed, and he doesn’t sugarcoat it.
“We’re in for some relative hell for at least a couple of quarters,” Healy said Monday in an interview with the Dallas Business Journal.
Healy, founder of Rogers Healy and Associates Real Estate and owner and CEO of Rogers Healy Cos., said the likely slowdown in the months ahead will have an upside in that it will cause real estate agents who don’t belong in the field to wash out.
Here are his observations on the market and other residential topics.
How has your company been affected in the past four weeks since the onset of COVID-19 in North Texas?
We have not seen an impact yet, financially, at least for my company. We had a really good March, and we’re having a really good April. I think we’re going to see it May, June and July. We shut our offices down March 12, and I believe we were the first offices in North Texas, if not Texas, to do so. It was difficult at first, but we’re adjusting.
How is the market changing?
It is starting to slow down. I think we’re a couple of months away from it being really, really difficult. Right now, realtors are still finding a way to survive, or to succeed, but we haven’t hit rock bottom yet. I think our rock bottom is going to come a month or two after the peak. It’s going to be a couple of months after that when we’re going to really see the impacts.
Why do you think we’ll have that lag before rock bottom?
There’s stuff like forbearance, where people think forbearance is the forgiveness of the mortgage. It’s not. They can go in and potentially press pause on the mortgage payments for a couple of months, and then it balloons, potentially with interest, to where they have to write a check all at once, which, that’s not going to happen. I would say if 50 percent of people who practice forbearance are able to make it happen, we’d be lucky. So, it’s going to lead to some foreclosures.
On top of that, lending requirements are changing drastically. This morning (Monday) a big bank announced at least 20 percent down and 700 credit score to qualify for a loan. That’s not even a jumbo loan – that’s just a loan. So I think we’re in for some relative hell for at least a couple of quarters.
I think real estate needs their toilet flushed of some of the realtors of DFW. I think this is going to be, unfortunately, the way to go and do that.
To read the rest of this Q&A, click here.
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