Last Updated on Friday, 12 June 2009 11:51 Written by Carl Johnson

The Real estate market continues to baffle me! After an extremely active April and May market, where lots of buyers were out making offers, the month of June so far has been slow. For a while it looked like we would be in for quite a spring market but the buying did not last long. The activity has helped home sales in 2009 and many market indicators show that we may have hit a bottom. Maybe not "the" bottom, but "a" bottom.

Sales in surrounding towns are up 21% this year from the same time last year. There is an 8.4 month supply of homes in May. Not bad, 6 months might be better but an improvement from last may when we had an 11 month supply. Selling prices seem to have hit a plateau again. If you recall we had stable prices last year until late 2008 when we took another 6% dip in prices in the last quarter. That fall was due to the failure of many lending institutions. Today home prices in the area are nearly 30% below the peak in 2005. This puts us back in the range of home prices in 2002.

I think the buying activity we have seen this year can be attributed to an improved perception of the economy, some first time buyer incentives, and low interest rates. All of this coupled with home buyers who are growing impatient to buy a home and the feeling that even if the market declines, it does not have much more to fall!

Market Notables

• Single family home sales in the month of May 2009 are Up 18% from 2008.

• Year to date sales of single family homes in the area are up 21% from last year.

• The average price per square foot of a home sold in May of 2009 was $134/sf.  Down ~13% from a year ago ($155). This is 28% less than the peak in 2005.

• The average number of days it took to sell a home in May of 2009 was 156 days.

• The number of homes on the market in May 2009 was 696 homes. This is about 15% fewer than in 2008.

This data is based on information from the Northern New England Real Estate Network for the periods shown for the towns of Amherst, Bedford, Brookline, Francestown, Greenfield, Greenville, Hollis, Lyndeborough, Mason, Merrimack, Milford, Mont Vernon, Temple, and Wilton.

The data is for the sale of single family homes and exclude condominiums and mobile homes.
This data does not represent all sales. Some sales are not reported through the Multiple Listing Service.