However, it also appears that the last few weeks have seen a few more homes come on to the market, which is not unusual for spring time, so we will have to keep an eye out and see if the increase in inventory levels puts a damper on recently rising prices.
To read more about this subject, please visit our website at www.DCRealEstateMarketplace.com
If you are interested in the Potomac real estate market, you might want to read a new blog post at our main blog, here: http://dcrealestatemarketplace.com/potomac-real-estate-market-update-for-march-2012.
In that blog post, we discuss the median asking price of homes currently for sale in Potomac, as well as how many homes are for sale now, and inventory levels over the past three years. But we ran out of room, and didn't talk at all about how long homes are staying on the market, on average.
Sadly, for home sellers in Potomac, according to the graph above, it seems to be taking longer and longer for homes to leave the market. This graph covers two years, but in March of 2010, it took an average of 140 days, and now that number is closer to 170 or 180, depending upon whether you are looking at weekly data points, or the rolling trend line.
That post looks at a composite metric for the area, but I wanted to include one graph here that wasn't included on that posting. The graph above is for the past three years and tracks the median asking price of homes for sale. It appears that over the past few months we have seen a bit of a reboun in asking prices as they have been heading up for awhile now. Perhaps that is just a spring bump, but if it helps put our local market into a bit stronger position, then I am all for it.
With a few more months of continued rise in prices, we might actually get back to where we were three years ago. If you read the article I referenced above, it appears that the Bethesda real estate market may be actually preparing itself for little run here, so I would be surprised to see asking prices continue to rise, perhaps even surpassing the highest levesl we have seen since 2009.
But here is one extra graph that we didn't include, and it's a bit difficult to explain, especially the very far right side. Basically, if you read the blog post, at the same time as prices were falling this past year, and inventory was soaring, it appears that Days On Market measurements were falling, which in itself is puzzling.
But then add in our latest measurement, which makes it look like the most recent DOM has just been cut in half, and it gets really difficult to explain. My guess is that this is simply an outlier or anomoly, and that in the next week or so, we will see the numbers level back out.
For more information on Bethesda real estate or any other community in and around the greater DC area, please don't hesitate to visit our website at www.DCRealEstate Marketplace.com.
The federal government has exhausted their options for trying to help the real estate market rebound. Low interest rates, loan company bail-outs and mortgage refinancing deals have gone nowhere fast. “There isn’t a lot the government can do to prevent foreclosures,” says Paul Willen, a researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. “And we’ve just been banging our heads against the wall now for four years, trying.” Laurie Goodman of Amherst Securities forecasts that 1 in 5 homeowners will have trouble with their mortgages in the coming years.
The Feds understand all too well that America’s prosperity is closely linked to what’s going on in real estate. Americans need jobs to buy homes. More importantly, Americans need jobs and homes to feel confident enough to spend in other places. In a typical expansion, Goldman Sachs says that housing contributes half a percentage point to growth in GDP. Over the past year, housing has actually subtracted 0.15 of a percentage point from our GDP in a negative feedback loop.
So here's a third graph to see if we can't really figure out what is going on...
This graph shows how long homes in the area have been staying on the market over the past two years. Sadly, this graph isn't very helpful either! Our measurements today are a bit higher than they were two full years ago, which makes it seem like a bad number. But at the same time, today's homes are on the market a shorter time today than they were last year, which makes it seem like we are making progress!
Most markets are either clearly improving, or clearly declining. But not here in Gaithersburg, it's all up in the air here, it all depends upon each specific home.
For more information on Gaithersburg, or any other area in and around DC, please visit http://dcrealestatemarketplace.com
