Are We Turning the Corner on Housing?
March 24th, 2008 categories: Chico Real Estate
With bad news about the economy, housing, the weak dollar, and the war, seemingly constant of late, any bit of good news seems to be “really good” news when we hear it. Such was my sense this morning when I heard that sales of existing homes actually INCREASED in February.
According to the National Association of Realtors, sales by homeowners rose 2.9% last month. My initial reaction was… “phew”, this could be the kind of news that gets people feeling positive and engaged once again. My second reaction was, “Shoot. I missed my opportunity to seem really smart and insightful by pronouncing that, ‘Now’ is the time to jump into the real estate market and grab some great deals”. I still believe that to be the case… but, don’t seem nearly as smart or insightful telling you that in light of this report. If only I had gotten to it yesterday..
Well, all may not be lost. I, like most people are hungry for “good news” and will grab onto any bit of it like a drowning victim to a life raft…even if that life raft is a .99 cent store plastic inner-tube. We should be careful to look at the full picture and view the good news, and the bad, in context of the whole story. There seems to always be a bit of both.
In this case, the bad, or… not so good… is that home prices dropped nationally a record year-over-year 8.2%. Ouch. But, remember what I said about context. This price reduction, while painful for many, did spur an increase in sales activity that may be getting us closer to where we need to be in order to turn the corner on this market.
So, I choose to look at this report in a positive light and do believe that if you have the resources to pull the proverbial trigger on real estate, now is the time to do it. Even if prices were to experience some further reduction in price, if you are buying for the right reasons and the fundamentals are good, you should be comfortable with the decision you make to act now. In a couple of years, you will probably look like the smartest person in the room, because you took advantage of great rates and low prices and you didn’t sit on the fence waiting for everyone else to figure it out. They say, “timing is everything”, and by the time everyone else gets off the fence and back into the market, the best opportunities may have passed you by.
