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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: biometricgngboy who wrote (14904)	11/8/2003 7:44:29 AM
From: biometricgngboy	Respond to of 306849

(Chronicling the Boom - more of the usual stuff we're accustomed to reading) It's a seller's market in Tallahassee By Juana Jordan DEMOCRAT STAFF WRITER Looking for a home under $180,000? Then pay close attention: The pickings are slim. It's a simple matter of supply and demand. Buyers want homes, and sellers want to sell them - at their price. And it's working. The real-estate market is so tight that sellers are getting what they're asking and, in some cases, a little more. "I had some buyers that made a full-price offer," said Betsy Henderson, owner of Innovation Realty. "Another Realtor came in and had a buyer to offer $5,000 more." In the last three months, from August through October, the average selling price of a home - including resales - in Leon County was $185,746. A year ago, during the same period, the price was $163,533. Credit low interest rates. For the past two years, they've been the reason for the surge in real-estate purchases. Currently, rates hover between 5.25 and 6.25 percent on a 30-year-mortgage, which has left few properties - particularly affordable housing - on the market. Affordable housing is described as those homes less than $100,000. "The market is hot," said Sandy Higdon, an agent with Coldwell Banker Hartung and Noblin Realtors. "It is definitely a sellers' market. There are more buyers than good houses available." As of a week ago, there were about four active listings of homes for sale in Killearn Acres, according to Don Pickett, an agent with Coldwell Banker and the chairman of the market trends and research committee for the Tallahassee Board of Realtors. Two of the homes, which were new, were on the market for two weeks or less. "Sellers feel as though their properties are hot and they can get what they want for them," Henderson said. "When I counsel my clients, I tell them if they really want the house and can afford it, get it. They might not have a second opportunity to put their best offer out there." If buyers are paying more than the asking price, it's because of one or two things: Either the buyers wrapped the closing costs into the deal or paid more to ensure they got the property. In Tallahassee many of the properties that have been scooped up have been townhouses under $130,000 and homes averaging $150,000 or less, according to Pickett. "I had a buyer looking for a townhouse in the northeast, northwest and southwest between $115,000 and $150,000," added Pickett. "There were only three on the market. When you have a situation like that, they go fast. I put a townhouse on the market two weeks ago and had two offers on it in two days." Henderson says she believe it's new developments such as SouthWood that are driving the market, as more families are moving from the outskirts of town to be closer in. And the more people who buy in the subdivision, the higher the prices go, pushing other home prices in the market upward. But real-estate agents are not expecting the home drought to last much longer. The word, said Higdon, is that rates may be on the rise again by the first of the year. "Once rates go up, people will be in a crunch," she said. tallahassee.com