Leaving politics out of it... Here is my take:
We sold an island property last season that was on the higher end price-wise and tried to buy something more economical. We made offers on 2 properties and could not come to terms on either. One of them had some issues which we were willing to work around and made what I felt was a fair offer mid season. The sellers didn't even counter, they snubbed their noses at us even though they had no other activity in the pipeline. At the end of the season they did get a deal on the property and it closed for about $15k more than my offer. I was pretty irritated being that we were close enough that we could have made it work. I believe it was sold by the listing agent though instead of through a buyers agent. I'll get to that later.
The other one had been on the market for ages. We tried a few different times to work with the sellers on it and were stonewalled by their agent, who was working frantically in the background to find a buyer of their own, which they finally did. My last offer was higher than what they took elsewhere, but again, sold by the listing agent.
Sold by the listing agent to their own buyer= full commission
A few agents out there, one in particular, really work in their own interest and not the interest of their client. They will pass on a well qualified buyer working with in agent to take a deal that is solely theirs, sometimes for less money. And some are extremely lazy and wont even get on a boat to go out for showings.
I think the season in general was slow for sales, some of the properties that sold were leftover properties from the previous year or two. There was a lot of overpriced material that did not go anywhere and will probably pop back on this season. Some of the more unique properties were the ones that sold, such as entire islands. Ours was a very sweet (not biased at all
) property and we had an offer within 48 hours of listing. We were also priced fairly.
We will be back at it this spring, looking to buy.