The Week in Review
.…your Wilmington Connection
July 12, 2008
In the Wilmington real esate market we have 2934 homes on the market. Currently 16% of those are under contract. House prices are still holding steady and homes have been closing on average 95% of there list price. There still is hope in the air if you are currently selling your home. If youj are thinking about it, then let me tell you about my marketing plan that will get you home sold. Contact me.
Homeowners Say River Road project shaking houses
For Jon Deputy, it’s bad enough that a developer is moving River Road within a stone’s throw of his neighborhood.
The developer, California-based Newland Communities, is operating a sand mine on its property.
While Newland has the appropriate mining permit and county officials have given their OK, Deputy doesn’t understand why mining is allowed near homes, even if it is temporary. He said his house on Tanbark Drive shakes from the work. He wonders how long it will last.
Kathleen Rosa, who owns a home at the end of Lorraine Drive, said her family moved out in late April because of construction noise. Now the Rosas live in nearby Echo Farms, where they have gladly traded away their rattling windows for a busy golf course.
Most of all, residents like Deputy and Rosa said they feel the county has left their neighborhood high and dry in favor of the developer.
“We don’t feel like our county commissioners and county government act as an advocate for us,” Deputy said. “We feel they act as an advocate for Newland Communities.”
County officials say, however, that they have inspected the site a number of times to address residents’ concerns and have found no problems.
Area home sales and prices slip
Last month’s housing market in the Wilmington area was the slowest June since 2003, according to data released Friday by the Wilmington Regional Association of Realtors. Sales fell 33 percent from a year earlier.
And sale prices of homes – which have held their own here since the beginning of the national housing slump in 2006 – slipped from last year’s levels.
In June, the average purchase price of homes in Wilmington dropped 4.7 percent compared with a year earlier, slipping from $282,949 to $269,423, the Realtors reprted.
For the first six months of the year, both the average and median prices of homes sold were down about 4 percent compared with the first half of 2007.
Wilmington has not suffered the double-digit drops in home values that have slammed formerly hot areas such as Florida, Las Vegas and California. North Carolina, in general, has seen prices hold steady. But the housing bust has not passed us by either.
Sales are down almost 60 percent from their peak in the second quarter of 2005, said William Hall, economist at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. “If you smooth out sales on a moving average … they’ve been down here since the third quarter of last year,” he said Friday.
Removing random variation, he said, sales have gone from a peak of 900 a month to about 300 a month through May.
Home sales were down from May levels by 13.5 percent. That compares with a peak of 1,001 sold in June 2005 – an era of soaring sales and prices fed by easy mortgage money and, in part, by speculation.
For the first six months of 2008, sales fell 30.6 percent compared with the first half of 2007, to 2,435 from 3,512. If that sales pace were to hold for the year, the results would be the lowest since 2002.
The prices are only for homes sold and do not necessarily reflect the overall value of the area’s housing. They are often seen, however, as an indicator of the market’s strength. Additionally, the sales and prices represent transactions closed in June, with contracts signed 30 to 60 days earlier.
Sales peaked here in 2005, when 9,347 homes were sold in the area served by the Wilmington Realtors – roughly New Hanover and Pender counties and parts of Brunswick. Agents and others in the housing industry have pointed out that such activity was unsustainable.
The market did indeed return to a more normal pace in succeeding years, and prices stabilized as investors pulled out of a market that could no longer offer a huge return in a short time.
The decline in sales, though, has had a weeding-out effect on the number of agents in this market, and veteran agents have picked up some of the business lost by less-experienced ones, some of whom had never known a shrinking market.
The effect of the sales drop here and elsewhere in the U.S. is not limited to real estate salespeople. Builders have been left with a heavy inventory of homes, and that slowdown is indirectly reflected in the WRAR’s figures because they include new construction homes as well as resales.
The lending business also has seen a shakeout with the disappearance of cheap and easy-to-get loans with no down payment and no documentation of income. Mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have tightened their standards. The relative difficulty of getting a mortgage also has served to cut home sales.
…until next week in The Week in Review
Tina
