Ah to just have a crystal ball! But then again with out any surprises life would seem a bit dull. The best anyone can do is take an educated stab at what life may hold so here it goes. Continue reading
Unemployment numbers have hit a 2 year low, dipping below the national average to 8.8%. Nationally the lower unemployment numbers are said to include an unknown number of individuals who have given up on the possibility of finding work…hope that isn’t the case locally! I do know that people are finding jobs here. Micron Technology for one has been on a major hiring frenzy this past year and the sad think is most of the recrutes are coming in from out of the area. They seem to have exhausted our pool of local talent.
That was the headline in this weeks Idaho Business Review. I thought it was well put. If you look at the local stats, which a few national new sources have done, one would say it has to be a sellers market in Boise. While national housing inventory sits around 8 months (this means if nothing new came on the market it should take 8 months at the current sales rate to sell everything). Locally we are only sitting on about 4 months of inventory which in technical terms means a sellers market. The problem is it doesn’t feel like a sellers market or a buyers market. We seem to be at a bit of an impasse; buyers may have missed the boat for the killer of killer deals while sellers have said enough we have been beat up enough and we aren’t going down on prices anymore and well the banks, the banks are just hanging on to their money. The last time we saw these inventory levels was back in the boom days which begs the question why aren’t we booming now?
Those in the field have felt this trend deepening since the middle of summer. All of a sudden we had more buyers than desirable inventory and the ‘good stuff’ was Continue reading
well at least the weather is and I for one am grateful. This has been a crazy year for weather across the country: tornadoes, hurricanes, epic snow storms, flooding, earthquakes, drought, tsunamis, massive fires, ice storms but here in Boise it is rather dull. It seams like a number of years ago I saw Boise Continue reading
Ada County housing inventory is at historic low levels. In July 2007 we hit a high of 5198 available homes for sale, today we have less than half that many homes available (only 2538!). In October 2010 inventory dropped below the 3000 mark, dropping to around 2700 the beginning of 2011 and remaining there ever since. What is remarkably different this year is we never had the typical uptick of new listings we generally see the begininning of each summer. In just 4 months the months of available dropped from 5.7 months to 4.3 months. Just a couple years ago we where looking at 10 – 11 months of inventory. ‘Months of inventory’ means if we where to have no new new homes listed it should take 4.3 months to sell all the current inventory of homes. Of course this would never happen but the lower this number gets the healthier the housing market is assummed to be.
The third anniversary of the housing melt down in just a couple months away. I remember so clearly when the floor fell out and the economy took a nose dive. September 2008. My Mom had passed away almost a month to the day before this black cloud descended on the U.S. Some may think that is odd remember this so clearly Continue reading
Despite the Idaho Statements best efforts to thwart the local real estate market many feel there has never been a better time to buy a home. Mortgage rates have fallen for 8 consecutive weeks (a 50 year low), the local housing affordability has never been better and although home prices are expected to continue to decline the long term benefits of homeownership remain intact. Prices declined as much as 7.5% in April but according to CoreLogic if you exclude the distressed sales the market only declined 0.5%. Continue reading
There are very oddly hot pockets in the market right now, namely REO properties. Each bank owned home I have written an offer on the past few weeks has had multiple offers (4 to 5 for each home). Yesterday while showing a newly listed REO home in Meridian there was literally 4 cars full of buyers and agents waiting their turn to get in to see this latest offering. This feels much like the real estate boom of 2006 but today the focus is primarily on bank owned properties with multiple offers the norm with instructions to put forth you final and best offer. Buyers are flocking to these homes in a way not seen in years; with urgency one would expect with shelves running empty in a grocery store before a hurricane is to hit. Is there such panic the bank foreclosure market will dry up before the buyers do? These are not investor buyers, these homes are only open to occupant buyers for the first 15 days. Perhaps buyers have finally caught on that this is as good as it is going to get…we can only hope.
Which matters most to buyers; a home that fits their needs, appeals to that guttural sense of knowing they are “home” or just the bottom line…a house (4 walls and a roof). It appears to me those buyers that utter phrases like “I only want buy if I can get a steal” are looking to buy a house not a home. These are not investors but rather families looking for a place to house their family but not a home to enjoy. They end up walking away from homes that meets their needs over a couple thousand dollars tops because they are unable to see the larger picture. In many cases they write offer after offer, never getting their first choice of home because they are more interested in low-balling all offers only to end up with a house they don’t love. What these buyers do end up with is bragging right; the ability to boastfully say I “I took this seller to the cleaners and look what I got” to their knowing friends that just roll their eyes. We get out of life what we put into life, period. Sad is the person that doesn’t get this.
