The winning bidder for a Grand Rapids, Mich., house was offered almost $20,000 to hand his purchase contract to another buyer. An agent in Nashville got a property for his client by cold-calling local homeowners. And near Columbus, Ohio, it took a teacher five tries to clinch a deal to buy a house. It's the spring home-selling season, and listings in the U.S. are scarcer than they've ever been. The bidding wars common in perennially hot markets such as Boston, Denver, and the San Francisco Bay Area are now prevalent in the once slow-and-steady heartland. "Homebuyers are going to find this spring that, in a lot of markets, the inventory of homes priced and sized at price levels they were hoping for will be very limited," says Thomas Lawler, a former Fannie Mae economist who's now a consultant on housing issues. "Unlikely places are getting significantly tighter."
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