Are we out of this gray market yet or not? There seems to be some conflict on where home values are headed in the next few months. Among those issues are how much the houses are decreasing in value versus the perception of individuals related to the decrease in value.
In a recent survey, 49% of the respondents said that they believed their homes were decreasing in value and according to Zillow.com the percentage of houses that are decreasing in value is actually 72%. So that is a 23% discrepancy in the report. So what is really going on with housing values. Are they going down, stabilizing, or are we seeing a shift in the market that is upward.
One of the age-old adages of Real Estate is .... drumroll please .... "All Real Estate is local!" And that truly is the case. All real estate is local and we have to remember that real estate is a local commodity. I had a client (a couple actually) that were looking several years ago at investment housing and a principal residence for themselves. As we wrote offers on the various properties that they were looking at, they would low-ball the offers continuously. Over and over until I let them find another agent. Their rational, they were economists and they were looking at the statistics (which were declining in 2006) for the national market. But they were not able to see the fact that real estate is local. The DC market where they were looking was not experiencing the type of implosion that other markets were experiencing at that time. What my clients didn't get was that they have to look at what is occurring in the local market and then apply the economic forecasts to the market in which they are buying.
I don't pay anywhere near the amount for gas, milk, eggs, etc in Memphis that I did in DC! The cost of living here is lower and vis-a-vis it makes living here much easier. These are the things that people HAVE to remember when dealing with the market.
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