This piece in the NYT is aptly titled Home Sales, All Over the Map and that’s exactly the point! Depending on where you live, housing markets are extremely different from one another.
Areas like D.C. and San Francisco which had seen home values dropping drastically are leveling out, whereas, Las Vegas and most of Florida are still seeing these numbers fall. Like I just posted yesterday, Louisville isn’t seeing those dramatic drops because we never saw dramatic increases years before.
So is this a good time for you to buy? As always, that depends on your situation.
For Amy Musial, who manages a Starbucks in Sacramento buying a house became “a no-brainer” this spring once she and her husband realized that their monthly payments would be slightly lower than the rent they had been paying on a two-bedroom apartment. They paid about $229,000 for a three-bedroom house that had been through a foreclosure. Several years ago, the same house could have sold for more than $350,000, estimates Shelley Hescock, the real-estate agent who represented the Musials.
The best advice I can give is for you to find a trustworthy Realtor and ask as many questions as you need. Interest rates are still historically low and there’s a great deal of inventory still in the Louisville MLS, though we just dropped under 8,000 single-family homes today.
Update 7/24: The CJ decides to post the positive news, for once.
