January home sales: Insert gloomy adjective here
January home sale figures are out today for the Baltimore metro area, and -- if you're a seller -- they bode ill. Sales dropped 40 percent from a year earlier, the biggest decline since Metropolitan Regional Information Systems started keeping track in 1999. Fewer than 1,300 homes were sold, the lowest number on record.
To put that in perspective: Sales are now half what they were in January 2005, near the market peak.
Average sale prices in the metro area dropped 2.6 percent. (The median, or typical, home dropped 5.7 percent.)
Click HERE to check out the numbers -- including jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction -- at MRIS. And stay tuned for a full story tomorrow.
Good news for buyers? That depends wholly on whether and/or how much prices will drop in the future. Naturally, dueling predictions abound. But last month's price decline does start to close the gap between average incomes and average prices.
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Comments
oh you beat me to it. I was working on a post for this. Doesn't look so good for house prices.
Posted by: Kevin | February 11, 2008 8:30 PM
The more posts the merrier!
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | February 11, 2008 8:54 PM
Hi Merry Wives of Real Estate Market in Balto!
If sales are down, traditionally the prices need to go down too. What are the folx waitin' for?
PS
Was this merry enough?
Posted by: Sir John Falstaff | February 11, 2008 9:02 PM
Very merry, Sir John -- I thank thee.
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | February 12, 2008 5:29 AM