For Some Ready To Buy, A Good Home Is Hard To Find
The first day of spring typically signals the high season for open houses and home sales.
The season seems to have arrived early in some places where homebuying is already frenzied, and in many markets, the pendulum has swung from an excess of homes on the market a few years ago to a shortage.
In Baltimore, Patrick and Britney Bove are fighting on two fronts, so to speak. On one hand, they're hosting an open house in the city's Hamilton neighborhood, and on the other, they're trying to find a house to buy. This is proving difficult, much harder than it was last summer when they casually sampled the market.
"There seemed to be a lot more houses on the market," Patrick Bove says. "Everywhere we looked, every weekend, there was something cool. Now that we're finally looking, that's when the shortage has hit."
There's a kind of mad quality to their search, and it's made worse by alerts they get to their phones from realty website Redfin every time a new listing posts. They'll even check them in the middle of the night, to the point, Patrick Bove says, where he sometimes doesn't recognize himself.
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