A buyer’s agent-eye view of the housing market

The Warren Group and MLS collect great data, for which I am grateful; however, the data they publish does not much help me and my buyers.

First and foremost, to fully understand what is going on with prices, one needs to look locally. State-wide and regional figures do not help a buyer figure out what to do. Second, markets are patterns. You cannot see what is happening by looking at a few months at a time.

Here’s what I do. I look at a smaller area for a longer time. Here are towns within I-95* (data collected from MLS). Starting at 2004, I see a big decline in the number of sales by 2005, and prices slipping down in 2006. That’s when all the “real estate bubble” talk made sense. Now, prices are about even to what they were last year – not as far down as Warren Group sees and not going up as the Realtors say. We had a buyer’s market going last year, with nearly seven months of inventory sitting around to pick from. This year, we have only four month’s supply. That is not indicative of severe price dropping.

Remember, I am a buyer’s agent. I think lower prices are good and I would love to see more of them. However, I do not see a bubble burst around the corner, no matter how much I hope for one.

*towns used: Brookline, Newton, Belmont, Lexington, Arlington, Winchester