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.

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.

Winter is a very  inconsistent buying season for real estate. Interest from home buyers rises and falls with the weather. When it gets very cold, it snows, or if the weather is very gray, buyer activity is noticably slow. On days when the weather is sunny and warm, buyer activity picks up.No body wants to go out in foul weather.

It has been very cold lately  here in New Hampshire with temperatures in the single digits and still the buyer activity has picked up over the last week. Interesting! I do not expect there to be any huge uptick in buying but I did think that it was a positive sign that there was at least interest in the market.

It may be that buyers are concerned about the long term direction of interest rates. There is more talk in the news about rising inflation due to the injection of money into our economy from the "bailout" packages. This in turn will cause interest rates to rise. So those buyers waiting for home prices to drop are faced with a decision, wait for lower home prices and be faced with higher interest loans or buy now at the lower interest payments with the possibilty of dropping home values. It really is difficult to know what to do and I think buyers are struggling with this problem.

Just some observations of th emarket here in Amherst New Hampshire.