You can probably guess this, but I vote for ‘something else.’ Before I get to that, let’s do some statistics. Thanks to Mike Wright of our MLS NORMLS system for putting together market stats.

January 2008 saw 5,462 listings on the market in our six county area of NE Ohio. (This includes Medina, Cuyahoga, Lorain, Lake, Geauga and Ashtabula.) This was an 84.1% increase from the same time frame in January 2007.

There were 1,112 homes sold (single family) in January of 2008 in the six county region. That was a 25.5% decline over last year’s figures.

The lowest sale price was $1.000.00 (yes, you are looking at that correctly, that is one thousand). The highest sale price in January 2008 was $1,825,000.00. Overall, sales prices are down about 50%.

The biggest factor, in my opinion, is the rate of foreclosures we are experiencing.

Tie that in with anyone who gets a job transfer and tries to sell a home when they have not owned it for a long period of time and well, they might be in a short sale or foreclosure situation, too.

Some of this is sobering, yes. There are some up sides, however.

The interest rates may be hovering closer to 6% now, but is that still not better than the 14% rates I had as a homeowner in the 80s? And home buyers are finding they have a larger choice of homes available than they would have a few years ago. Continue reading this post