Buying, selling, and renting homes in St. Louis, Missouri seems a straightforward handshake business on the surface. Two parties meet on opposite sides of the table, haggle over points, and then agree to terms. But there’s a layer of nuance beneath it, used by those who pay attention to all the trends and shifting conventions. REI is an agency built from such minds, real estate professionals putting their expertise under one roof and extending their abilities with modern methods. But we aren’t experts, we are active real estate buyers who take hard-to-move properties off our clients hands, as well as effective bridges between other parties looking to buy or rent.
Selling your St. Louis property can be one of life’s big challenges, but it doesn’t need to be. At REI, we buy homes as-is for cash, and we handle all the documentation for you, and help you move past the waiting game of seller-to-buyer transactions. Our expedient processing can get you the funds necessary for your next purchase, or if you just want to unload burdensome property that’s difficult to maintain and replace it with a lump sum.
Buyers in St. Louis are faced with a crowded marketplace of potential deals attached to many different sellers and their respective help. There’s a lot to consider, like financing, location, interest rates, and timing. We engage potential buyers with the same attention to detail we use in our own purchases, explaining every step as we move along.
We connect clients seeking temporary leases with property owners who have space to rent. Our rental services are ideal for anyone in transition who needs to secure living quarters in a hurry, who may not have knowledge of the St. Louis area to know where to start. Beyond our considerable resources and connections, our agents are mostly natives, so you’d be getting inside information about your prospective area of residence.
The real estate market has always been an up and down arena—one moment it’s a buyer’s market, and another it’s a seller’s market. There are a lot of factors that go into the shift toward either like city growth, builder interest, and corporate opportunities. The city of St. Louis and its surrounding areas have been a hotbed for real estate over the past few years, creating a volatile market that many experts find it hard to predict. It culminated in 2017, when buyers were finding it tough to find homes in St. Louis. To say the market was competitive this time last year would be an understatement. Many found that other buyers were usurping their chances by overbidding on their dream homes and offering cash, some of whom were likely buying them just to improve and flip for a higher price. Families looking to stay under budget were extending themselves by thousands of dollars and still losing their bids for homes. As is always the case when a commodity is rendered unavailable by an influx of buyers, prices went up, and made homes even more unaffordable to moderate spenders.
Estimates vary from one database to another, but all had the homes sold in the St. Louis area at a 12-month high around June of 2017. Most went for around $200,000, where the average price over the 12 months since was about $175,000, and some had this median as high as $240,000 during this period. The market cooled as the year went on, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on which side of the buyer/seller table you sat. As the prices went down toward the end of 2017, buying increased, as those who had to wait their turn during that mid-year rush were still eager to place their welcome mats.
The market reached its coolest point around January of 2018. Low median prices around $160,000 created a buyer’s market for a few months, which strained the inventory of St. Louis County as much as it had been in a while. Currently—late April-early May of 2018—the St. Louis real estate market has leveled out to a more balanced playing field between buyers and sellers. Prices are beginning to surge back up into the $175,000-$180,000 range as inventory continues to stagnate. Estimates vary widely from site to site as far as how much homes cost in the Greater St. Louis Area, but all agree that prices are going upward.