Hooray..Hooray..sales are up!!

Today the National Association of Realtors released its home sale statistics for the month of February 2009 and there is some very enticing data in the report.  First, existing homes sales rose 5.1% in February indicating that a lot of first time home buyers have made the decision to get into the game and why shouldn't they after all, intereswt rates are still at record lows and there is a lot of inventory to choose from.

If you are trying to sell your home, then you probably think that since sales went upo then values must have gone up as well.  I wish I could be the guy who says that yes that is true, but I'm going to stick to the pillars of my business & reputation which are Honesty & Integrity.  The truth of the matter is that while increasing sales is a very good indicator of change in the Real Estate market, values still declined by 15.5% according to the same NAR report.

Values are expected to continue to fall well into the later part of 2009.  I beleive the number one reason for declining values is the number of distressed properties being listed every month and the increasing number of distressed properties that are closing each month.  I'm here to tell you that this is not such a bad thing because the quicker we can sell the distressed property inventory, the quicker we can move towards stabilization of the Real Estate market.  To learn more about distressed properties and the Certified Distressed Property Designation log on to www.PensacolaShortSales911.com.

Values will begin to climb again but it's probably a minimum of 3 to 7 years before we see normal growth in values again.  To put that into perspective, values locally in the Greater Pensacola area typically rise at about 3-5% annually.  During the bubble of late 2004 and into 2005 we saw values skyrocketing sometimes at double digit growth...per month.  You didn't think that was going to last did you?  The market continues to give back anywhere from 1-2% monthly and we will no doubt see 2003 level pricing by the end of the year.  We are already seeing signs of 2003 level pricing in some areas.

Can sellers still make a decent profit on the sale of their home in these uncertain times?  The answer is absolutely they can!  Values in some cases are still higher now than they should have been given the historical growth pattern.  To learn more about Pensacola Real Estate please feel free to log on to www.PensacolaHomeSite.com.