pricing to sell: How Long Will It Take? - 12/29/10 05:38 AM
If you are thinking of selling your home then one of your questions will certainly be: "how long will it take to sell my house?"  In today's market, it's worth calling a few real estate agents just for the entertainment value of the possible answers:
How long would you like it to take? Let's list it and see what happens. Anyone who claims to be able to answer that is lying. When the Moon is in the 2nd house and Jupiter aligns with Mars. If you would like to plan your life around more than astrological projections or wishful thinking, you … (53 comments)

pricing to sell: Pricing To Sell in St. Charles, IL: Consider the Absorption Rate - 10/19/10 03:06 AM
Homeowners in St. Charles, IL who are thinking of selling their home need to consider the amount of inventory that they will compete with. Inventory sounds like boxes in a warehouse, but a successful seller needs to "think like a buyer" who is evaluating all the choices he has on the market. Realtors speak of "inventory uptake", or "absorption rate" which is the number of days or months or years it will take to sell off the current inventory at the current rate of sales.
Let's look at a real price point in St. Charles, IL: homes priced at $450,000 to $600,000. There are … (10 comments)

pricing to sell: Home Prices Will Continue to Drop: It's Simply a Case of Supply and Demand - 08/22/10 08:49 PM
Keeping Current Matters is the blog site of Steve Harney and his terrific real estate data ccollection and analysis team. Last week they published a series of reports and links from major industry analysts. The universal agreement is that home prices will continue to drop over the next six to eight months.
Steve published this chart last week that he says "may be the best real estate chart ever".

Steve's comment on the chart: "We can see that the experts are calling for prices to decline for the next year and then take another year to regain that loss and have values equal today's … (96 comments)

pricing to sell: Redefining Absorption Rate Using Assessed Value - 04/07/10 03:07 AM
I read once again today that the market is "stabilizing", but this means nothing more than what Ronald Reagan so famously quipped about the economy in the early 1980's "the rate of decline is decreasing". The amount of inventory is simply staggering and is due to dramatically increase with the "shadow inventory": homes coming onto the market from pending and imminent mortgage defaults. The loan modification programs simply are not significant fixes, the rate of recidivism within one year is 70% (number of people who default a second time). One internal BofA report says that they have 1,000,000 short sale applications … (2 comments)