After hitting two-decade low, are home sales poised to rebound?
Good old 1990. The Massachusetts Miracle had just gone bust and banks across New England were tottering under crazy office development and condo loans.
Well you have to go back that far to find a year when home sales were as low as they were in 2011, real estate publisher and data firm The Warren Group reports this morning.
Sales of single-family homes dropped 6 percent in 2011 compared to 2010, to a grand total of 38,994. That's just as few thousand above 1990's anemic total of 35,819 sales.
Worse, the year ended with a thud, with December sales having fallen 5 percent compared to December, 2010.
But at the risk of sounding like a born-again housing market bull, a closer look at the numbers points to some reason to hope that we'll see a modest sales rebound in 2012.
For starters, December was somewhat of an aberration in a quarter that actually saw a small bump up in sales. There were nearly 10,000 sales in the fourth quarter, compared to 9,461 during the final months of 2010, The Warren Group reports.
Meanwhile, the economy is slowly but increasingly surely on the mend, with Eastern Massachusetts, at least when it comes to jobs in fields like biotech and high-tech, a national bright spot.
The biggest impediment right now may not be the jobs market but rather the limited inventory of homes for sale right now on the market.
Sellers aren't eager to test the waters yet - the big question is whether more will take a chance on the coming spring market.
But a lack of decent inventory has left many buyers who had been hoping to score a deal feeling frustrated instead. Here's a comment below from one would-be buyer who has been searching for months in the western suburbs, to no avail.
He had been hoping to spend $400,000 to $500,000, but is quickly realizing that he is stuck with fixer-uppers at that price.
My guess is that (after months of watching)if we want four bedrooms and a decent yard with good location with favorable commute then we should expect to pay about $600k+. And I'm not talking about Wellesley, Needham, etc. I'm talking about Natick, Wayland, Sherborn, and to a lesser extent Holliston.
