The Stayton market has done some great stabilizing this year, but that has more to do with people pulling their homes off the market and just not selling rather than anything else. I fully expected home prices to drop a solid 10% from 2009 as the market fundamentals were all indicating strong downward pressure on real estate prices here. That didn’t happen.
The average home price actually popped up 6% in 2010 over 2009 and the median home price increased 3.4%. Homes didn’t appreciate in the way that most people think about appreciation, but some more expensive homes finally sold in 2010 after well over a year on the market. The drop in interest rates and the tax credit this year appear to have enticed people to buy in Stayton, as these numbers were much better than I was expecting.
Honestly, I don’t see how this can be the bottom of the Stayton real estate market so I am skeptical that this trend will continue.
The other three main factors in real estate fundamentals, home sales trends, inventory, and foreclosures are still really high. Inventory is at 14 months as of this post; foreclosures jumped 28.6% over 2009; and home sales, while up are still way off normal volumes.
Sales did pop up from 2009 but this was expected with the tax credit earlier in the year.
Foreclosure notices are still hammering the small Stayton market and the huge increase isn’t surprising given the state of the Oregon economy. While the last two quarters have shown a drop in notices, which is a great trend I hope continues, for the year they are up substantially.
The end result…a mixed bag of real estate results for Stayton. Inventory down since the summer by about half, foreclosure notices up, home sales slightly up from 2009, and home prices up.
We’ll have to see what the numbers bring this year, but considering that 50% of Stayton sales in 2010 occurred before April 30th, when the tax credit ended, I’m thinking that the market will continue to correct here as the foreclosures put downward pressure on the market.
The data in this post was crunched from the WVMLS and information obtained from Fidelity National Title.