Central Ohio Real Estate Market News

A few days after the end of each month, I update the “Subdivision Home Sales” page (see tab above the header). It’s the most popular page or post that I do according the tracking data. It includes home sales results for top subdivisions for Dublin, Powell, Lewis Center, Worthington, Westerville, New Albany, Delaware, as well as other subdivisions in Southern Delaware County.

Just to let you know, I’ve just updated it to reflect the Homes Sold in Jan-Apr 2008. I also improved … hopefully … the table format to give it a cleaner look. This new format will also make it easier for me to enter the new data each month, since there’s not so much html code involved.

If you haven’t already been one of the thousands who reference this chart, be sure to check it out.

Copyright © 2008. Reproduction of any portion of this blog post or the images is prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If this post is being viewed on any site other than www.ReesesPiecesOfRealEstate.com then the material has been stolen without permission. Violators will be reported.

Here’s another update on the House Watch data published in The Dispatch’s Sunday paper. The number of homes for sale and the prices for these homes are increasing slowly this year.

More notable is the difference of this year vs last year’s data. There are 7.5% fewer homes for sale now but their asking price is 2.6% higher than last year. This is REALLY important news for Buyers who have been hesitant to act.

This data comes from the Columbus Board of Realtors® and includes the counties of Franklin, Delaware, Madison, Morrow, Union, and some listings of Fairfield, Knox, Licking, Logan, Marion and Pickway.

Here’s an update to a post I did April 13 on The Dispatch’s House Watch chart. The chart’s data didn’t change substantially from last week.

There are still 6.4% fewer single-family homes for sale at prices that are 2.4% higher than the same time last year.

This data comes from the Columbus Board of Realtors® and includes the counties of Franklin, Delaware, Madison, Morrow, Union, and some listings of Fairfield, Knox, Licking, Logan, Marion and Pickway.

As a resident of Delaware County, I received a letter from Todd Hanks, the county Auditor. The purpose of the letter was to counter the negative national media news regarding housing prices and foreclosures - much as I’ve tried to do here on my blog.

Some notable comments from the letter …

Realtors® have noticed that business often picks up once the Super Bowl is over. We don’t understand why since there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between real estate and football, but it happens every year.

On Inman News, a guest writer Avram Goldman, added yet another Super Bowl phenom as it affects the stock market. Per Goldman, “the equity markets have had an uncanny direct correlation to the housing market and vice versa for the past 11-plus years“.

OK, here’s the last report to be updated with year-end data - I think!

This report shows the 5-Year Average Home Price comparison by central Ohio school district. It should be the final “nail-in-the-coffin” that shows that central Ohio DOES NOT have severe falling prices like California and Florida. (click on the thumbnail to view full size)

Our growth has been quite conservative over the years. There was some minor decline in 2007, caused by all the media hype and higher than normal inventories. Builders have cut back the number of specs and we’re getting some of the resale inventory sold, so things are improving.

We’re probably not out of the woods yet, but as I noted in yesterday’s post, the market is looking like it might improve a little over last year. For the economy’s sake nationwide, let’s hope so.

The percent change of the 2007 average home price versus the 2003 average home price for each of the school districts, is as follows:

This morning I posted that I thought the real estate market seemed to be moving UP. Later this afternoon when I was reviewing visitor stats to my listings on Realtor.com, the stats seemed to support that thought.

I pay extra money to subscribe to Realtor.com’s Showcase Listing feature which not only allows me to add 26 photos but also to add extra descriptive copy for the home. It also allows me to view a graph that shows the weekly visits to a given listing.

I’ve removed the property specific information, but here’s what some of my listing’s graphs are looking like. The red bars represent the number of times someone clicked on the home’s listing page to view details and photos of the home. 

I’ve been watching these graphs for years, and have never seen such a dynamic increase to visitor hits on Realtor.com.

That tells me that a LOT of buyers have decided that it is FINALLY time to act. Maybe they’ve decided that prices are as low as they’re going to go, and the buyers want to act before they start to go up. (BTW, I’ve already noticed some builders specs had price increases this week.)  

And no wonder … with the mortgage rates taking another dive the past week, it’s a great time to buy.

Copyright © 2008. Reproduction of any portion of this blog post or the images is prohibited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If this post is being viewed on any site other than www.ReesesPiecesOfRealEstate.com then the material has been stolen without permission. Violators will be reported.