A new report from realtor.org showed all of us in the real estate business a little bit of good news as well as a little bit of bad news. Let’s begin with the good news.
The Good News
The news that we enjoyed hearing about is that price levels across the country have bounced significantly year to date. Price levels are just short of 10% higher than they were last year. This is significant because a price rebound is necessary not only regionally, but across the country in order to stabilize the market and bring consumer confidence back to the housing market.
The good news is that we are seeing a definite recovery and price levels on a national level, and the media’s ability to relay this information to the public will eventually warm our collective hearts to the idea of home purchases. Once our collective hearts are warm idea, there’s a good chance the market will again begin to function correctly.
The Bad News
The bad news is that supply is very very low across the nation, and because supply is low the actual number of sales across the nation has dropped significantly. In order to feed the industry we need supply levels to rise in the number of transactions to recover. We in the industry are not asking for market peak levels of the last decade, but we do need to see relatively consistent transaction figures in order to stabilize price and continue to drive the market towards a healthy mean.
The irony of this bad news is that supply generally comes from homeowners. Homeowners who, for whatever reason, decide to move create the supply for the market. The challenge here is that the market supply is low because people are unwilling to sell at these levels. But if people are unwilling to sell at these levels, how will the market ever receive supplies needed to create a functioning housing market?
That is the question of the day…