Front Lines

Well, the weather has gotten cold but the market has warmed up a bit. Fair amount of activity although it remains in the lower price ranges. There is a little activity and it is slowly moving up through the price ranges. We put a nice property on the market at $550,000 (which the seller and I agreed was a stretch in looking at the comps) on a Friday and got a darn good offer on Sunday. Home inspection is done and we are all wrapped as of Thursday. We have another home that we feel is very well priced at $599,900 and there are no lookers at all. Go figure. We were recently at the NVAR Convention and it was a common theme that inventory was getting very difficult to find in the $500,000 and under category which is a bump up from the $400,000 and under of previous months. Town home inventory has dropped just a tad and the number of sales has increased from last month and both categories are significantly improved from the same month last year. however, if you look at the average number of sales per month for the same time frames it is exactly the same at 30 sales per month, so some of the buyers that bought earlier in the year are buyers that typically would have waited. How is that for looking at the glass half full?! The number of new listings coming on is substantially lower this year for single family homes as well as for town homes. Not much different this month from last month the the exception that the number of distressed properties in the $500K to $700K range tripled since last month. I do not read much into that short of how it played out this month. We still are not seeing a significant jump in new foreclosure activity and that is certainly something we are watching closely. Let's hope it stays that way. As our market continues to unfold, I will as usual keep you informed