Is the Jacksonville real estate market really as bad as the media says? My answer to that would be no! From my perspective as a REALTOR we have seen the bottom of the winding roller coaster ride and we are making that start back up the hill. You know the one that set you back in your seat and straight up holding on tight. That is the direction I feel us heading toward. The beginning of 2007, okay most of 2007, was a slow year for real estate in Northeast Florida. But the beginning of 2008 has made good forward progress. Sure, we had the interest rates changing daily at the beginning of this year. We still have the foreclosures coming on strong, and of course we have the short sales too. You have to love the short sales. But all in all the the market has stabilized in the Jacksonville region.
Watson Realty Corp., who happens to be my broker, tracks our weekly barometer from office to office. With nearly 40 offices and over 1,700 agents in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia, we get a pretty good feel for what is going on in the market. We follow the trends from the previous years and compare them on a weekly basis to our current sales. Let me tell you, the housing crisis is over just like the Wall Street Journal article read at the beginning of May. Homes are selling… and selling well. I have recently been involved in a transaction with home that went from “fresh on the market”, to pending in 14 days. It would have only been about 6 days but the negotiating took a few more days than planned. The reason I mention this is because if you price your home correctly it will sell!
If you bought your home in 2005 or 2006 like many of us did you may not be able to get out of it what you paid for it, but you can still sell it if you need to. You will just have to look at the big picture. Lets say you have to sell because you are being relocated to wherever your career is taking you. If you sell your home for $300,000 that you paid $350,000 for in 2005, chances are the city you are moving to will have the same change in the market that you just experienced with your old house. Even though right now it seems like you are losing $50,000, you are really just buying into the same lower market value where you just left off. What this means is the housing market will rebound, as it always does. Once your new home appreciates, you will most likely be right back where you started from, the $350 ish range.
Another way to look at the current market is the savings you could have from the low interest rates of today. The market is showing improvement daily and the interest rates have not been this low for this long for, well pretty much forever. I am pretty sure the house you just left and most likely had a mortgage on, did not have an interest rate as low as todays rate. Think about a rate of 6.25% fixed (todays average rate) for 30 years vs. the interest only loans or the fancy 24 month ARM that you had to refinance. Ahh… how we love closing costs just adding back up again. Didn’t you just pay those 2 years ago? Or if you did not get caught in an ARM, how about the 10% rate (or more) you were charged just because you did not have enough time on your job. The bottom line is, lower interest over 30 years equals huge savings. For example: If you take a mortgage of $300k at 6.25% vs only 7.25% (which is still a good rate) over 30 years you would save, get this, $86,215.78 roughly, but who’s counting anyway. And that is just at a 1% savings, imagine how much you would save if you were paying on one of the “creative mortgages”. Think about that extra $86k earning you interest instead of giving it to the bank. Is this all starting to set in?
I am not sure why the media wants to make everything negative, or why they would want our own American people thinking negative about the greatest country in the world. I am still not sure how only the media holds the answers to all of the worlds problems. Never mind the professionals who work in the multiple industries that are the true specialists. If you get a panel of “news reporters” (whatever that may mean anymore) together to share their opinions on a television show, it must be true. Never mind what mathematics and science has proven, the housing market has fluctuated for years and so has the temperature of the earth. We have seen the bottom of the housing slump in Northeast Florida, and I know that now is the best time ever to buy a house in our market!
Lets work together to stop Global Whining!
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