One Way to Sell Your House: Ask the Right Price

In the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ 1991 hit “Learning to Fly,” the long-faced singer bemoans how “what goes up, must come down.”

That’s the feeling as the once red-hot real estate market across the country cooled for the past few years. Patch wondered what the local and national real estate scenes are now, and asked some Glen Ellyn experts in the field about it.

Beth Lindner is a Keller Williams Realty broker representing sellers. She finds that her area is holding its own.

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Why House Prices Will Keep Falling

Tuesday's release of the monthly Case-Shiller U.S. house price index shows a 3.1% year-over-year decline for January. The index of 20 big U.S. cities fell to 140, just a point and change above its spring 2009 low in the wake of the financial meltdown.

The "dismal" showing included 11 cities hitting postbubble lows and "no real hope in sight for the near future," according to S&P's David Blitzer. Robert Shiller, the Yale professor who started the index along with Karl Case of Wellesley, said this month that  "there's a substantial risk of home prices falling another 15%, 20% or 25%."

The latest declines have some wags declaring now the time to buy a house. They see a recovering economy boosting incomes, the collapse of the homebuilding industry trimming oversupply and low interest rates making property more affordable than ever.

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4Q Wasatch Front Home Sales, Prices Decline

The residential real estate market remains mired in one of the worst downturns ever along the Wasatch Front, but it is showing some signs of improvement, a new report shows.

In Salt Lake County, 1,934 existing single-family homes were sold in the fourth quarter of 2010, down 21 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2009, the Salt Lake Board of Realtors reported Thursday. The median selling price was $215,000, down 4.4 percent from the same three-month period in 2009. Median prices peaked at $256,000 in the summer of 2007.

The Realtor group attributes the declines in both sales and prices to federal home-buying incentives that boosted demand for homes in late 2009 and early 2010. Sales fell off in the second half of last year after the incentives expired.

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Home Prices Decline in Nearly Half of Metropolitan Areas

Home prices fell in nearly half of U.S. metropolitan areas in the third quarter, indicating that the market is losing steam without government tax credits, according to an industry report.

The median price for home resales fell compared with last year in 76 out of 155 areas tracked by the National Association of Realtors, the trade group said Thursday. Prices rose in 77 areas and were unchanged in two.

In the second quarter of the year, prices rose in nearly two-thirds of U.S. cities.

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Home Sales Up; Prices Down

Home sales along the Wasatch Front are up dramatically so far this year, but what happens now that a federal buying incentive of up to $8,000 is expiring?

Certainly, the federal tax credit — along with low mortgage rates — played a leading role in pushing up sales of single-family homes in the first quarter. Although prices continued to fall, sales in Salt Lake County rose by 15.3 percent and condo sales by nearly 27 percent, compared with the same period in 2009.

Exactly how many of the buyers of 1,716 homes and 350 condos that changed hands in the first three months will claim or have claimed the credit isn’t known, but it could have been as high as a third, said Bill Heiner, president of the Salt Lake Board of Realtors, which issued its home-sale report Tuesday.

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Wasatch Front Home Sales Increase, But Prices Fall Again In Second Quarter

It's the same story, just a different quarter.

The sales of single-family homes along the Wasatch Front rose in second quarter, but median sales prices continued to fall.

Data released by the Salt Lake Board of Realtors Thursday showed that sales climbed as much as 18.39 percent in Tooele County during the second three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year. However, the median sales price for single-family homes there fell 5.58 percent to $169,950.

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Wasatch Front Foreclosure Picture Continues To Darken

The Wasatch Front’s foreclosure problem continues to grow, a new report shows.

Owners of nearly 8,300 residential properties in the Salt Lake metro area received a foreclosure-related filing in the first six months of the year, according to RealtyTrac, a company that tracks foreclosures nationally. That’s up more than 55 percent from the same six-month period last year.

By comparison, the number of households nationally facing foreclosure rose only 8.3 percent from January to June.

The Salt Lake area was among 154 out of 206 metro areas with a population of at least 200,000 that had an increase in foreclosure activity. But the rate locally tops the national average, with one in every 48 homes receiving a filing, compared with one in 78 U.S. homes.

“Obviously, the numbers are a little depressing,” said Salt Lake City economist Jeff Thredgold, a consultant to Zions Bank.

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Is The Real Estate Market Turning Around?

The home sales index spike from the home buyer tax credit has almost run out. If you didn't have a deal in escrow by April 30, you didn't get the credit. The time to close a deal was extended to September 30. The predictions were that we'd see a fall in July activity which is exactly what is occurring.

The reports that are currently coming in don't yet reflect July sales which will show a drop in sales. For example, the Case-Shiller report came in yesterday for May, 2010, but that report is a three-month average of prices. The report said prices were up 1.2% MoM, and 5.4% YoY. That was the peak of housing credit driven sales.

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Lower Home Prices Are Spurring Sales In Utah

About one quarter of all real estate transactions in Park City involve distressed properties.

That's not bad, said Deanna Devey of the Utah Association of Realtors. It's average for the state if not slightly better.

Foreclosure activity is definitely improving, said Park City Board of Realtors president Mark Seltenrich.

"They appear to be trending down, but remain historically high," according to the second quarter report summary from the board released July 22.

Devey said short sales account for 13 percent of all sales in Salt Lake, Utah, Davis, Weber and Tooele counties. They are only 10 percent of sales in Summit and Wasatch counties.

"Comparatively, Summit County isn't doing too bad," she said via email.

Statistics that sound negative but are actually good news was a theme for the mid-year report from the board of Realtors.

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Home Prices Falling Despite Low Mortgage Rates

The fine bloggers over at Calculated Risk have a good article today about the future of housing prices. In essence the article asserts that there have been declines in home values in both May and June that have yet to fully show up in many measures of home prices.

This premise is based upon data from Campbell Surveys that shows prices for short sales fell 6.3%, move-in ready foreclosures fell 6.8 percent, and non-distressed properties dropped 4.6 percent.

The decline can likely be traced to several factors. First is the collapse in demand for homes following the expiration of the first time home buyer tax credit at the end of April (the overall weakness of the economy also plays a part in the lack of demand). The next factor is the massive overhang of houses on the market and in the hands of banks and lenders. Finally, the sheer volume of foreclosed and distressed homes negatively affects the price of homes.

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Housing: Right Back Where We Started?

With all the gloom and doom in the present conversation about the national housing market, you’d think we were recovering from a complete financial meltdown instead of the expiration of the first-time homebuyer’s tax credit.

Funny coincidence about that—these days, it seems like everyone, from the analysts to the big builders, is talking about how July 2010 looks a whole lot like April 2009, when the market was just emerging from the darkest days of the financial meltdown.

This morning, the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index–a monthly yardstick for investors and market-watchers that gauges whether CEOs of homebuilding companies are feeling like raising a glass of champagne or downing a stiff drink–showed that builder confidence in the market had fallen to its lowest level since April of last year.

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Pricing Your Home To Sell In Today's Market

With no federal tax credit to entice buyers, today's home sellers have to get even more serious about making a deal.

That means pricing aggressively -- low enough to compete with foreclosures in some markets. It's a conversation that stings, said Summer Greene, a real-estate agent for a Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate brokerage office in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

"It's like telling them that their children are ugly," she said.

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Sector Snap: Housing Stocks Rise On Housing Report

Shares of several homebuilders jumped Wednesday after a report showed pending home sales surged in April to the highest level since October.

The National Association of Realtors said its seasonally adjusted index of sales agreements for previously occupied homes rose 6 percent in April from a month earlier to a reading of 110.9. March's reading was revised upward to 104.6.

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First-Time Home Buyers and Boomers Feel Effects of Housing Downturn Most

Although the situation is open to interpretation as well as change, there are growing concerns that the effects of this economic downturn could have a long-lasting effect on the housing market.

A study by the Mortgage Bankers Association, conducted by Kentucky economics professor Joe Peek, concludes that “the current financial crisis and recession exceeded the devastation created by other post-World War II recessions.”

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Home Prices Could Sink Without Tax Credit

Home prices are widely expected to fall now that a tax credit for home buyers has expired.

That's raising concern about a possible double dip in home prices.

National housing prices stopped falling early last year and rose 0.3% over the 12 months ending in February, according to a study by real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

The firm predicts prices will fall this year before starting to rise again in late 2010. Even so, next February's prices are likely to be 4.2% lower, it forecasts.

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Home Prices Stabilizing

Home prices appear to be stabilizing as demand for higher-priced homes picks up and distressed properties, still a large part of the market, are no longer changing hands at the deeply discounted prices of a year ago.

Overall, home prices declined 0.7% in the first quarter of 2010 to an average of $166,100, the lowest first-quarter national median price since 2002, when the average was $158,600 according to a report by the National Association of Realtors. However, there was wide variation by region, with median prices up 9% in the Northeast and down 8% in West.

And the number of metropolitan areas where median prices are rising, instead of falling, grew for the fourth consecutive time. In the latest quarter, prices gained in 91 of the 152 metropolitan areas tracked by the Realtors compared to 67 in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 30 in the third quarter.

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Utah Home, Condo Sales Up, Prices Down

A federal tax credit for home buyers helped push up sales of single-family homes in Salt Lake County 15.3 percent in the first quarter, compared with the same period last year, a new report shows.

Prices, however, are still falling.

The Salt Lake Board of Realtors reported that 1,716 home changed hands, up from 1,489 last year. The increase is a sign that the market, in a downturn since the summer of 2007, may be inching toward recovery. Sales of condominiums also were up from last year, by an even larger margin. In the first quarter, 350 condos in Salt Lake County were sold, up nearly 27 percent from the first quarter 2009.

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Time Ripe to Buy US Homes Before Prices Rise

Most consumers think U.S. homes are affordable and the time is ripe to buy as many expect prices to rise in the next year, a new survey showed on Wednesday.

U.S. home buyers remain worried about the economy. But with average home prices down about 30 percent nationally from 2006, mortgage rates low and federal tax credits still in play, more than 80 percent of buyers see this as a good time to purchase, a Century 21 Real Estate LLC poll found

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8 Signs Of A Real Estate Rebound

Is the housing market on the verge of recovering? Is it recovering already? If you're not sure whether you believe the economists and pundits who think they can see the future, here are some tools that will help you make up your own mind.

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Utah's housing market: Good time for buyers, but for how long?

After walking a pair of reporters through the World War II-era brick cottage, Bill Heiner is questioned about whether the home's $209,900 price point might still be too high given the renovations and upgrades the property requires.

The affable 30-year real estate veteran says he doesn't think so and that the current price tag, down almost 10 percent from the initial listing, is close to the sweet spot for this fixer-upper that literally stands a stone's toss away from Fashion Place mall. Confirmation, he said, could come soon in an offer he's awaiting on the home, which is part of an estate being liquidated by family members.

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