If it weren’t for bad news, we’d have no news at all! –this is my feeling lately. What with oil gushers in the Gulf of Mexico, Natural Gas explosions killing people, tornadoes and threats of hurricanes, I didn’t need the bad news predictions from economists today.
There was a National Association of Real Estate Editors meeting recently and economists said “the housing market likely will not recover until 2013.” Hey, I want it to recover today! They are not predicting things will get any worse. They are only saying that things will stay flat for a while. I’m curious to see what our broker’s market report looks like for May, after the tax credit ended in April. We had an increase in sales in nearly all of our Western WA counties over the last several months. It will be sad if we now see a drop in sales.
However, we seem to have a lot of pending sales in our region right now, so as I said, I’ll be eager to see the latest market report. Our guy usually does his report about 10 days into the next month to be sure that agents have submitted their information into the NWMLS. I’ll try to remember to let you know what this report shows.
Zillow is saying that housing prices are going to continue to go down; that we haven’t reached bottom yet. However, that doesn’t seem to be true in our area. We are seeing prices flattening out, not continuing to drop like they were dropping. Nevertheless it is hard to know what to tell sellers these days. They want to hear that all is well, and that their property will sell, but we can’t quite say that yet. And I find it harder than it used to be to help people decide how to price their property. We don’t have as many comparables as we used to have. Sometimes we are digging back into the past to find those comparables, and I for one don’t feel as confident in the results.
In the meantime, we continue to struggle with the Matrix system for our MLS, and are grieving the loss of our previous program. It is difficult to understand why those who get to make decisions for the rest of us decided to change systems. I still believe — if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
Tags: bad news, housing prices, market report, Matrix
