I’m always looking for some perspective on the real estate market, both for my own need to understand my business prospects, and also because lots of folks ask me questions about the future of real estate since the economy is so solidly tied to it. Well, my crystal ball isn’t working very well, but I do have access to lots of data about our market over the last few years that hopefully can be used to do some rough projections. The bar charts below come from the Carolina Multiple Listing Service. I’m showing just Iredell County numbers this time and have broken them into price ranges so you can see it does matter.
What you can see here is that inventory appears to be coming down in traditional, foreclosure and short sale homes in most price ranges. That’s good for buyers because too much inventory relative to the number of buyers out there keeps prices depressed. As inventory goes down, there will start to be some upward pressure on prices. Of course, I’m happy for my buyers when they can get a good deal, but when they do that because the economy is in the dump, that’s overall not a good thing, right? And my sellers need to understand that waiting for price improvements can be a long-term proposition.
One thing to be concerned about is the “shadow inventory” of foreclosures and short sales. If we don’t know how many there are waiting to hit the market, it’s hard to predict anything about the future. However, there does appear to be a glimmer of good news on that front, too. Standard & Poor’s recently issued a report that shows that the total number of “shadow inventory” homes is slowly being whittled away. Here is a link to an article in CNN Money that came out on that subject this week.
Hopefully, next year at this time we can look back at these bits of info as the early signs of a housing, and economy, recovery.
