A frequent refrain heard from me on this blog is that sellers aren't in tune with the new reality, bringing their asking prices in line with buyer expectations. The data, however, doesn't quite support my generalized broadside. I just took a look at the average and median asking prices for single family homes available in the Sullivan MLS. The average asking price has been creeping steadily shown since July 2008, when it stood at $294,985, to $263,293 today. (The average peaked in March 2007 at $312,381.) The last time the average asking was price this low was back in November 2004. The median asking price is now $199,990, a level it touched during the first quarter this year (and then crept up a bit), but well below the spring 2007 median of $249,000.
So overall sellers have been lowering prices, but probably not enough across the board yet to entice a lot of buyers. More and more sellers are 'getting with the program', though, and there are some good values mixed in with a lot of 'not-so-great-yet' listings. As I've written in this blog over the past few months, it's that small subset of great values that are catching buyers.
Old hands in the business, who've been through previous market downturns, say that sellers lag buyers by 6 to 12 months. I've been logging the monthly average (and median) asking price since October 2004, and since then the ratio of the market basket average asking price to the average selling price has been 1.45. (Note: this is different than the bid/ask ratio I post every month on closed sales, where I calculate the ratio of the selling price to asking price for each sale, and calculate the average of those ratios.) Today the market basket average asking price to average selling price is 1.68, indicating that sellers still have quite a ways to go in getting their expectations in line with buyers.
I have been living up here for 40 years.
When the big apple sneezes, upstate catches the flu.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/10/nyregion/10stuy.html?_r=2&ref=business
Posted by: Bob | September 10, 2009 at 12:01 PM