Yesterday I went to a presentation by Anne Marie Howard, the CEO of the Charlotte Regional Realtor Association. Anne Marie did a great presentation on what she sees in our real estate market and what conclusions can be drawn from her observations. I won’t try to restate everything she told us, but one of the observations she illustrated with a slide was the total real estate closings each year from the year 2000 through 2008. Here’s the graph:
As you can see, 2008′s closings were around what we saw in 2003. Knowing what we know now about what drove the run up of closings in the intervening years, it’s likely we won’t see the levels of 2006, the peak year, for quite a few years to come. That may sound bad if you’re interested in selling your home, but remember that it turns out these sales were artificially inflated due to the lax lending environment. Now that we’re suffering from the results of that environment, I’d guess you’d agree with me that we had better be satisfied in the future with whatever rate of real estate sales comes from doing it the old fashioned way- like when lenders lend only to people who can afford to make long term mortgage payments!
Stan, Great information for home buyers and sellers in our area. I agree that it will be quite a while before we see our 2006 numbers again…I started in the old-fashioned era of 20% down and think it will be very healthy to return to that more conservative approach.