News, News and more News!

Being in the business that I am, I tend to be a news junkie. I have a son who is in law school at the University of Florida and is also in the Army Reserves and recently returned from a tour in Afghanistan. He has a few years left on his Army commitment which also serves to motivate me to stay on top of things.

We have endured 2 years of our local paper playing “chicken little the sky is falling syndrome”. Now the latest headlines in the local paper and national news is the month of May having the 1st increase in home sales over May of last year by 2%. As you can imagine I really hope this is a trend but I really think that distressed sales are what is driving the volume upwards. Now this is still a good thing since it will aid toward price stabilization. I investigated the figures of what is happening in our market as far as single family home sales as well as condo sales.

We have 2 associations in Brevard County, Central Brevard which is my home association is called Space Coast Association of Realtors (SCAR), south Brevard is the Melbourne association of Realtors.

I have researched SCAR only and this is my findings:

During the month of May this year there were 475 single family homes sold in the month. During the month of May in 2007 there were 474 single family homes sold. You can see that the increase is one home.

During the month of May this year these were 120 condo and townhomes sold. In the month of May 2007 there were 130 sold.

The prices of single family homes sold in 2008 were down between 17 to 20% depending on the range of prices. The prices of condos are still falling and average between 22% and 30% decrease and I believe we will see a further reduction. We have seen one large complex go to auction with about 19 sales that sold for about 50% of the original list price. We will see other complexes go this route or be reclaimed by lenders.

Now I don’t want to be known as Gloomy Gus but my thoughts are as such. There will be tremendous opportunities to be had for buyers for at least the remainder of 2008 and possibly the 1st quarter of 2009.

Pick and choose very carefully and know when to walk away.

Find a buyer’s agent if you are relocating to our area, it is just too difficult to drive by and look for signs. Most of the time the listing agent is not your best bet to get the deal on his or her listing and that includes me.

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Jim