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Current Housing Supply and Demand

Housing Demand

According to research at the National Association of Realtors (NAR), buyer activity in January was three times greater than it was the prior year. Home buyers who are ready, willing and able are in the market at surprising numbers.

 

Housing Supply

The most recent Existing Home Sales Report from NAR revealed that the months’ supply of housing inventory had fallen to 4.4 months which is the lowest it has been in over a year!

 

So what does this mean? Listing your house for sale when demand is high and supply is low will guarantee the offers made will truly reflect the true value of your property. List your home today!

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Thinking Of Selling? Now May Be The Time

 

It is common knowledge that a large number of homes sell during the spring buying season. For that reason, many homeowners hold off putting their home on the market until then. The question is whether or not that will be a good strategy this year. The other listings that do come out in the spring will represent increased competition to any seller. Do a greater number of homes actually come to the market in the spring compared to the rest of the year? The National Association of Realtors (NAR) recently revealed which months and days of the year most people list their home. Here is a graphic showing the results:

 

The circles represent the ten most popular listing dates in 2014. We can see that all ten…

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Did it Make Sense to Wait on Purchasing Your Next Home? 

There are many people out there who debated purchasing a home over the course of the last year, but ultimately did not. Whatever their reasons were for delaying, let’s look at whether the decision to wait to buy made sense.

What happened in 2014?

The 30 year fixed rate on January 2, 2014 was 4.53% as reported by Freddie Mac. Looking at the chart below, your monthly mortgage payment with principal and interest for a $250,000 home would have been $1,271.17. Even though interest rates have dropped below 4% and ended 2014 at 3.87%, home prices appreciated by 4.8 percent over the same time according to the Home Price Expectation Survey. So that same home appreciated by $12,000 and now costs…

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Top 5 Reasons Americans Buy a Home

There's no place like home. The Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University performs a study every year surveying participants for the reasons that American’s feel are most important in regards to homeownership. Interestingly, the top 4 reasons to own a home were not financial.

1. Homeownership means having a good place to raise children & provide them with a good education. From the best neighborhoods to the best school districts, even those without children at the time of purchasing their home, may have this in the back of their mind as a major reason for choosing the location of the home that they purchase.

2. You have a physical structure where you & your family feel safe. It is no surprise that…

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Homeownership is the Best Way to Build Wealth

The New York Times recently published the editorial, “Homeownership and Wealth Creation.”  The housing market has made a strong recovery, not only in sales and prices, but also in the confidence of consumers and experts as an investment. The article explains:

“Homeownership long has been central to Americans’ ability to amass wealth; even with the substantial decline in wealth after the housing bust, the net worth of homeowners over time has significantly outpaced that of renters, who tend as a group to accumulate little if any wealth.”

Many of the points that were made in the article are on track with the research that the Federal Reserve has also conducted in their Survey of Consumer…

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Design a Dining Room for Dual Purposes

Dining rooms are often not used only for dining, but for doing homework, reading the paper, sorting and paying bills, crafts, or any other task where a table is desired. Keep your dining room functional for dining as well as these activities with a few simple ideas.

  • Incorporate a small dresser or hutch into the room. Use one or two drawers for table cloths and napkins, the others for things like pens, pencils, and scissors that might be used frequently at the table.
  • If you have the space, built in bench seating is a great storage solution.
  • If you read the paper at the table, keep a decorative recycling basket nearby to avoid stacks of paper on the floor.
  • If the dining room doubles as a…

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Are You Disregarding the Main Features of Your Home?

Here is a quick test to find out: stand at the entry of any room, as you look into the room, identify the main feature. This will be considered the selling point for your buyer. For example, if your main feature is a fireplace, declutter the mantle and arrange the furniture to incorporate the fireplace. Creating an inviting space which showcases the main feature of each room will prove the value of your home to buyers!

Tip provided by, Betsy Shellman, Coeur d’Alene Home Staging Services

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Autumn is the most beneficial time to fertilize your lawn

Grass roots begin storing the nutrients it will need to get through the winter and come up strong the next year. For best results, fertilize once in early fall and once more about 6 to 8 weeks later, around Thanksgiving. Your lawn will look great in the spring, and will be better able to resist weeds and summer stresses.

Fall can also be your most successful seeding time. In fact, over-seeding with grass seed and fertilizer in the fall can make your lawn up to 49% thicker next spring.

 

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How to Shop for a Mortgage

A home is one of the most significant purchases most people will ever make. The process is filled with decisions-selecting the right neighborhood, finding the right floor plan, and choosing the right financing. Just as a professional real estate agent can help you narrow down your home choices, a skilled mortgage loan officer can help find the right loan for your personal needs. 

 Make sure your loan officer has your best interests in mind. 

  • Do they ask about your goals, in terms of time frames, acceptance of risk, etc?
  • Are you being listened to, or is the loan officer presenting his or her preferred products? 
  • Are you being given choices in interest interest rates and fees rather than a "one-size-fits-all"…

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