It’s our turn. Give your house away. The new normal. Phrases about the real estate market abound. Supply and demand seemed destined to never work in tandem like we need them to for a healthy market. I couldn’t help but reminded of that phrase “never the twain shall meet” as I stared at data chart after data chart wishing supply and demand would just have a good talk, hash out their differences, and just move forward.
In January and February, it was nice to finally say that it was the best in the past three years. March is no exception. By best, I mean the best for Salem home sales, not the best for home prices. That has to do with supply and demand starting to have a meeting of the minds.
Home prices dropped year over year for March stats. We saw this same dynamic for January and February. The good news is that dropping prices is having the desired effect in that buyers are seeing that with the lower real estate prices and low interest rates, it might be time to consider buying. Don’t worry, I won’t break out into some kind of NAR “It’s a good time to buy” dance here, but I like the direction the data is headed.
Home sales have picked up and real estate agents are doing jumps of joy because let me tell you…trying to sell a non-foreclosed home has been exceptionally difficult in the past three years.
It is still difficult, but it is a bit less difficult and most of us will take what we can get. You can clearly see by the chart…the market isn’t going gangbusters here, but it did show improvement in that some inventory seems to be finally moving off the shelf.
Inventory for homes in Salem Oregon currently stands at 12.8 months. This is a nice improvement over the 15 months it was at towards the end of 2010.
So overall in, the first quarter of 2011, home prices dropped 9% over 2010’s first quarter and home sales increased by 12%. What I like about this data for the real estate market is that this is the first time that we have had a positive increase in sales that wasn’t associated with the tax credits. All the other pretty increases on these charts have to do with the tax credits which scrunched a lot of buyers into a specific quarter rather than being spread out over the normal real estate cycle. The fact that home sales were able to increase on their own is a good start to permanent market correction and stability.
Now…if we could just do something about the job situation in the area. That would have a huge impact on the real estate market in a positive way.
If you want to jump on the real estate bandwagon, get your home search on here.
This data was crunched from data collected from the WVMLS.
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