Blog

Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 April 2010 17:35 Written by Carl Johnson

Souheganhomes has been updated to provide better service to its visitors.

This site is updated hourly for all the properties for sale in New Hampshire on the MLS. Most sites update only once per day. By updating the site every hour you have the most up to date list of properties available. I hope you find this change to be useful in your search for a home in New Hampshire.

Last Updated on Monday, 09 February 2009 15:41

Just published are the reports for the local souhegan valley market and the NH statewide property report. make sure to check them out.

Remember at the end of each article is a link to the full PDF report with more charts and graphs!

Last Updated on Wednesday, 28 January 2009 04:26 Written by Carl Johnson

Over the last week their has been a noticable uptick in real estate buyer activity.

Web site activity is up about 30%  across all of our sites and I have been recieving inquiries from the web sites. Something that had actually stopped over the last 6 weeks. We have also had more phone calls about properties. All good signs.

Last Updated on Saturday, 01 November 2008 11:43 Written by Carl Johnson

Real estate has been extremely quite over the last few weeks. September home sales in New Hampshire were up about 3% and it looks like we will also see home sales up in October versus last year. However, the number of homes put under agreement in October is looking like it will be down. Despite this I think we are set for positive news in the following months.

Written by Carl Johnson

The Merrimack, NH planning board approved, on Tuesday, Chelsea Property Group's proposal for Merrimack Premium Outlets. The approval was the culmination of a four year approval.

Merrimack Premium Outlets will be 550,000 square feet, with 135 high-end clothing and home-good stores located off Exit 10 on the F.E. Everett Turnpike.

Chelsea Property Group is attracted to the 170-acre property because of area demographics, location and the market in New Hampshire.  The company estimates that it will invest $150 million in the project.

Groundbreaking is estimated to begin in the next four to six months. After that, the outlets will take 18-24 months to complete - which falls between summer and Christmas 2010.

Although the project has been controversial, it is expected to bring a lot of jobs to the area and bring in substantial tax revenues for the town of Merrimack. This could help offset the losses due to some other local businesses that have shut down. Certainly it will bring in a lot of people from Massachusetts and surrounding New Hampshire towns. The increased traffic should also help other local businesses.

For more information see this news article

Last Updated on Sunday, 03 August 2008 04:39 Written by Carl Johnson

Have you heard about the guy who bought a house at 60% of what is was worth? Lots of people seem to have heard something similar to this and are out looking to get a great deal like this one. This is OK. But what really concerns me is that most buyers do not understand what that "great deal" really means......

Last Updated on Thursday, 31 July 2008 05:13

Is our market still in decline? or are we close to the bottom? I think I see some daylight. Little bright points that are illuminating a market change. You have to look hard to

Last Updated on Monday, 28 July 2008 04:19 Written by Carl Johnson

Over the past 2 months my computer has started to act up. You know, it runs really slow, gives errors that the 10 billion gigabytes of memory is not enough, stopped talking to my printer. Typical Windows stuff. It seems to start happening about every 3 years.

Last Updated on Monday, 21 July 2008 04:03

You would think the way the market is that banks would be anxious to sell.  Bu so far, I have not seen the banks negotiate like they really want to sell....

Last Updated on Monday, 21 July 2008 04:03

Now that the site has been rebuilt and we moved to a new, more powerful server, I thought I might as well give the site a new look! I stayed with the familiar red theme but tried to dress it up a bit and use a larger, more easily read font....

Last Updated on Monday, 21 July 2008 03:57

Well.... finally I am getting back to normal. I have the Souheganhomes site switched over to a nice new Xeon server. This is a server with dual quad core processors. It is part of our commitment to marketing New Hampshire real estate on the web.

We felt we could not be effective on the internet...

Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 July 2008 16:10

It took about a week after the catastophic loss of my web site, but it is back up and running! For those looking for this months market report, I will have it posted this weekend. There was some good that came out of this whole incident

1) it gave me the opportunity to clean up the site. After several years of adding and deleting functions the site needed a good cleaning.

2) We decided to upgrade the server to a new, high end, dedicated server on which to host all of our sites. Hopefully this will improve the performance for the site visitors.

I recieved a few emails from some site visitors asking if I was going to continue to make the Market Reports available on the web site. The answer is YES. This months report will be completed in the next couple days, so look for it here this weekend. I will post a link on the front page when it is ready. I will also get a report completed on the entire New Hampshire market. I generally write these reports once per quarter and June marked the end of Q2.

If you have any questions or problems, by all means contact me and let me know.!

 

 

Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 July 2008 16:12

This past week my site went down. It was a very stressful day made even more stressfull by the fact that 3 backup files, used to restore the site in case of a problem like this, were corrupted or empty.

 

This was a catastrophe for me since it meant that I would have to rebuild my entire site, almost from scratch.

Please bear with me while I get my site back up and running properly. On the bright side, it is a great opportunity fo rme to make some improvements. We are limplementing a new, much more powerful server. I will also be adding som enew content to teh site. You may even see a slightly new Look.

Keep checking back over the next couple weeks. By the way, this does not affect the Property Finder search service that I offer. 

 

Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 July 2008 16:11

Home prices in the Amherst New Hampshire area have dropped about 8% from last year and sales of single family homes are down 5% from last year. Land in the area, however has faired far worse this year. Land sales in the area have dropped 10% and prices on average have dropped 24%.

Existing home prices have declined from their peak in late 2005 but builders have not been able to stay competitive on pricing of new construction. There are three major cost components in the construction of a new home. Land, labor and material. The builders have little control over the cost of material which are now influenced by national factors and the price of fuel. Material costs over the last 3 years have increased about 10% per year. Labor costs can be controlled to some degree but they can not be brought down to the point where they have a significant impact on the overall price of a home. This leaves land as the one variable that can be controlled.

With the cost of building being so high there are fewer home buyers in the area willing to build. This has decreased the demand for land in the Amherst area. Of course with decreased demand comes lower prices. However, land prices did not start to come down until very recently.

Why? Land in Southern New Hampshire has become a commodity. There is less developable land in the area and the people who held it were not in a hurry to let it go, even as the market slowed, hoping the market would come back. Builders especially have been holding on to the land since a good building lot has been hard to come by. If a builder does not have land available, then they can not build and if they can not build they can not earn a living. So they have been slow to sell it off. It seems that sentiment is changing and land prices are coming down.

With land prices coming down the cost of building a home should also come down. We are in an adjustment period right now and new construction is a little bit behind the existing home market in terms of price adjustment. But it is starting to happen. The one unknown at this point is how high fuel prices will go and the affect of on the cost of building a home.