There is national news-which says that the number of foreclosures will go way up this year due to the recent settlement with the banks, and there is local news, which is optimistic about what we can expect with the market. My prediction for 2012 leans a little more to the cautiously optimistic side. I think that we will see more of the positive signs from 2011 and around the same number of new construction permits being taken out, but not a spike in those numbers. In a buyers market, you don't see sellers moving locally or doing "move up" moves for the basic reason that their current home is probably going to take a hit if they purchased it within the last 10 years, or if it is an older house that has not been updated recently. The sale of higher end homes comes mostly from employees being relocated back to the area, and that appears to remain consistent.
January 2012 compared to the prior January of 2011, we saw in increase in closed sales of 9.9% throughout central Illinois. We saw a decrease of new homes coming on the market of 3.7 percent. The decrease in the inventory would back up my reasoning above-that people aren't going to move if they stand a greater chance of selling at a loss, even though this also means they might buy a great deal with crazy low interest rates. The number of homes pending from last Jan to this Jan was also up 15.1 %. That all bodes will for a recovering market. The average sale price also increase a little...3.6%, as did the listing price to sale price ratio. The overall inventory of available properties for sale is down a lot....from 2,878 properties in Jan 2011 to 2,367 properties in Jan 2012, for a 17.8% drop in available homes. The months supply of homes was also down drastically (16.9%) to a 6.7 month supply. What that means is that hypothetically, if no other homes were listed this year, at the current rate of sales, everything would be sold off in 6.7 months.
If you are in the market for a home, now is a great time to be looking seriously because if the numbers above continue at this pace it means that the market has turned a corner and is getting better. Of course this is a one month comparison to a single month last year. As we continue to get more data month to month it will be easier to see a pattern-both good and negative-if there is one.
If you would like to get a market update for sales and available homes for any particular city, price range, school district, house style, subdivision, etc, just shoot us an email indicating what kind of report you are interested in and we will set you up to get automatic updates on all of the data above!
January 2012 compared to the prior January of 2011, we saw in increase in closed sales of 9.9% throughout central Illinois. We saw a decrease of new homes coming on the market of 3.7 percent. The decrease in the inventory would back up my reasoning above-that people aren't going to move if they stand a greater chance of selling at a loss, even though this also means they might buy a great deal with crazy low interest rates. The number of homes pending from last Jan to this Jan was also up 15.1 %. That all bodes will for a recovering market. The average sale price also increase a little...3.6%, as did the listing price to sale price ratio. The overall inventory of available properties for sale is down a lot....from 2,878 properties in Jan 2011 to 2,367 properties in Jan 2012, for a 17.8% drop in available homes. The months supply of homes was also down drastically (16.9%) to a 6.7 month supply. What that means is that hypothetically, if no other homes were listed this year, at the current rate of sales, everything would be sold off in 6.7 months.
If you are in the market for a home, now is a great time to be looking seriously because if the numbers above continue at this pace it means that the market has turned a corner and is getting better. Of course this is a one month comparison to a single month last year. As we continue to get more data month to month it will be easier to see a pattern-both good and negative-if there is one.
If you would like to get a market update for sales and available homes for any particular city, price range, school district, house style, subdivision, etc, just shoot us an email indicating what kind of report you are interested in and we will set you up to get automatic updates on all of the data above!
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