Hitting bottom? Pending sales finally up again locally
The real estate market fell off a cliff after April, when the home buyer tax credit ended.
And it just kept on falling through the summer and fall, with home sales plunging by 30 percent.
But as we head into 2011, has this tailspin finally bottomed out?
Well just check out today's report on pending sales by the Massachusetts Association of Realtors, which reports a 5.3 percent increase over December, 2009.
That's the first move up in sales after seven months of brutal declines.
But hold the champagne. For that's not quite the whole story. In fact, it would have been hard not to beat the December, 2009 numbers.
Recall that November, 2009 saw a frenzy of buying as Congress debated whether or not to extend the $8,000 home buyer tax credit.
Buyers feared the credit would expire at the end of the month and rushed to get homes under agreement and collect their bounty. Of course, Congress eventually budged, extending the deadline through April, 2010, but not in time to quell the frenzied panic buying. (Of course, more than a few of those buyers, in their rush to collect $8,000 from Uncle Sam, probably ended up overpaying by that amount and then some.)
Of course, this binge was followed by a severe hangover, with December 2009 seeing a big drop off in sales. After all, most buyers had rushed to put homes under agreement in November.
Not a hard target then to beat. The real test will come when the January and February pending sales reports come out.
Stay tuned.
