The View From Where We Are Standing...

Since the beginning of this quarter, we have observed some changes from last year. Most sellers in '08 were still insisting on listing their homes as if prices were not declining, and sales, as a result, were pretty stagnant.

This year, however, with the sad state of the economy on the front pages every single day, sellers have woken up to the fact that property values are in decline, and will probably be so for a while. Also, appraisers have tightened their criteria to only looking at comps no more than three months old, and then depreciating those comps at 1% a month. Armed with this information, sellers who then properly price their home anywhere from 1-3% under their most recent comps have seen a lot of activity. Our most recent listings, priced just under the most recent comps, have all had multiple offers. People frequently ask us "in what price range?". Well, in our case, it has been happening in various price ranges; low $400k, high $600k, and low $1mm ranges.

We have noticed that buyers who had sat on the fence all through '08 are hopping off that fence now, and are back in the search for property, due to the fact that they are finally seeing better values on the market, combined with historically low interest rates. Many of these buyers are finding themselves in competition with multiple offers, although prices are not being driven up significantly by the multiple offers as they had in the past. Now more than ever, the buyers with the best chance of having an offer accepted and moving towards a successful close are the ones with a sizeable down payment...no less than 20%, and preferably 25-35% to be safer.

Although we have seen values in our area decline, they have not tumbled quite as far as the outlying areas, chiefly because of our outstanding location and wonderful communities. We do believe that there will not be a market recovery for several more years, however we remain optimistic that our prime location will shelter us from the more severe declines of outlying areas.