When working with first time home buyers, they have a lot of questions, and usually don't even know what they should be asking beyond "Is now a good time to buy?" For those clients, it's important to keep it simple while still giving them the information they need to make a good decision. We recommend using the Market Insights dashboard. This is by no means the only way to create an first time buyer analysis, but we find this recommendation to apply well to the most situations.
For this example, we're using the Price Distributions. Obviously, filter the dashboard down to the Property Type and Areas of interest. You can also limit the price selection - using the current Median Price as an upper bound of your analysis is a good starting point.
1. The Active Inventory chart shows where there are available listings. If your buyer is limited to <$200K in this example, they'll have much fewer options of homes to choose from. This is a quick way to show them how the options change with a little bigger budget.
2. The Days on Market chart shows that homes sell at different rates based on price. Combined with the chart above, you can see that although there are more homes about $200K, they are selling quicker, so your buyer may not want to wait to too long to make up their mind on making an offer.
3. Finally, the Percent of List Price Received chart shows that not only will your buyer need to make a decision quickly, but they may need to write an offer over Ask in order to get the home of their dreams.