Now May Be A Good Time To Sell Your Home
If you have been waiting for the market to improve, your wait may be over. The October report from the Utah Association of Realtors indicates that there has been a steady increase in real estate prices in southern Utah over the last 6 months. The inventory of homes available is shrinking. This reduction in supply also includes reductions in short sales, and REO (bank owned) properties for sale. As with anything, when the supply is reduced the demand, or (price) goes up. This means that it is a better time to sell a home than it has been in the last few years. This seems to be a local trend as northern Utah still seems to be unchanged. Southern Utah is more in line with trends in Las Vegas and California. Las Vegas prices have also been steadily rising.The trick for most people is to sell their home while the prices are up, but not up so far they won’t be able to buy another one.
Market Correction
As mentioned above real estate prices are moving upward. In case you have not been following the real estate trend in the last few years, you may not be aware that about 6 years ago real estate prices skyrocketed to a super inflated point that could not be sustained. About 2 years ago the market corrected itself and real estate prices came tumbling drastically down. In many cases the prices were much lower than they were before the market jumped up. This situation left many people in a situation known as “upside down” in their home value. This simply means that they owed more on their home than it was worth. This situation was coupled with a recession, and many people were not making as much money as they had previously made. In many cases people were unable to keep their homes. Some had to take out bankruptcy,while others were pushed into a short sale. We will explain short sales and foreclosures later in much greater detail. While this may seem redundant to some, we explain this for young people that may just be entering the real estate arena.
What Created This Problem?
There is still a lot of finger pointing as to what created the real estate imbalance. Without getting political, it seems to be the result of home lenders being forced to extend loans to people that may not have been able to afford the monthly payments for the homes they were approved for. Another factor is centered around bundlers on wall street selling bundles of these loans to unsuspecting investors. These two factors were accompanied by a down turn in the economy. Together all of these problems combined into a “perfect storm”. In some cases super inflated real estate prices dropped in half. Thousands of people lost their jobs and were forced to take lower paying jobs, and many people were unemployed so long they gave up looking for work. Other people have been treated so well with government assistance, that they can’t afford to get a job.
