{ SPECIAL REPORT }
THE HEAT GOES ON
Bergen’s real estate market shows some signs of cooling, but buyers continue to get scorched. Here’s how to fireproof your search. By Leslie Garisto Pfaff
For someone whose offer on a house has just been accepted, Erik Cruz sounds less than celebratory. Over one and a half months, he’s looked at houses all over Bergen County and made offers on six of them, only one of which—his latest—was accepted, although all of them were at least $40,000 over the asking price. “I’ve been really stressed,” he says. “It’s been really hard.” And as he waits for the results of a recent home inspection, he continues to worry. He has no certainty that the seller will work with him if the inspection turns up a serious problem. “If it doesn’t work out, then I have to keep looking,” he says, ending the sentence with a kind of strangled sigh. Call it the “COVID bump” or the “suburban migration” (or simply, as many have deemed it, “hot,” “wild” or “ludicrous”), the real estate market in Bergen County and elsewhere around the country is still torrid, though—depending on whom you’re talking with—it’s showing some signs of cooling off. “Right after Memorial Day, it started to cool,” says Sarah Drennan, executive vice president and broker associate at Terrie O’Connor Realtors in Saddle River. She ascribes some of that leveling off to buyer fatigue. Buyers, she says, “weren’t winning contracts in multiple-offer situations, and some of them decided, ‘You know what? Let’s cool it for the summer.’” On the other hand, Nathaly Castillo, a broker at Weichert Realtors in Tenafly, hasn’t seen much of a break in the heat. Houses, she says, are continuing to draw multiple bids, many of them considerably above the seller’s asking price, and buyers are still taking desperate
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