The top story in The Bulletin’s business section this morning trumpeted the news that single-family home sales in March were up sharply over the previous month.
“Bend home sales up as prices drop,” said the headline. The smaller headline under that one added: “Houses spend fewer days on market.”
Based on the Bratton Appraisal Group’s monthly report (available to subscribers only) the story noted that “home sales jumped more than 64% from February to March and … Bend homes spent fewer days on market, falling from 193 in February to 137 in March.”
So let’s pop the champagne corks and sing a rousing chorus of “Happy Days Are Here Again,” right?
Well, maybe not. The statistic that The Bulletin story didn’t quote, but that you could discover if you took the trouble to study the graphs accompanying it, was that the big 64% jump was from an anemic 56 sales in February to a still-puny 92 sales in March. That’s about 40% below the 154 sales recorded in March 2007 and 54% lower than the 200 sales in March 2006, when the boom was really roaring.
One encouraging fact mentioned in the story is that the median price of Bend homes sold in March dropped below $300,000 for the first time since September 2005, a possible indication that sellers finally have figured out that the bubble is over and they need to price their homes more realistically. But there’s a hell of a lot of unsold inventory still out there.
Will the median home price in Bend eventually fall below $200,000, as the BendBubble blog predicts? Or will The Great Rebound occur on April 25, as Dana Bratton prophesied in February? To use the hackneyed editorial writer’s phrase, time will tell.
This article appears in Apr 10-16, 2008.
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“One encouraging fact mentioned in the story is that the median price of Bend homes sold in March dropped below $300,000”
Encouraging? Are you nuts? Do you need to see people suffer for a story? How do you sleep at night?
Your glass will never be more than half empty. If you continue on this path and you will live a very unfulfilling life.
I am challenging you to give us a balanced view. Iâ ™ll bet you donâ ™t even own a home. What is your financial back ground? Do you have any experience in the financial world? Or are you just another loud mouth that likes to stir it up because you are lacking the knowledge to back it up?
Wandering EYE you are a sorry excuse for a human.
Additional note: The latest MLS data (posted on the Bend Economy bulletin board) show 73 homes posting lowered asking prices as of April 15. The drops range from less than 1% to almost 32% on a house in River Canyon Estates that started out at $1.1 million and is now down to $750,000.
I am not pointing this out to experience a sense of schadenfreude but because falling prices at this point are really a healthy sign. Prices have to get down to realistic levels before buyers will come in and clear out the surplus inventory so the market can return to normal.
Bendite, please see the post below yours. Although they are painful to individual sellers, in the long run falling prices are a healthy thing. The prices we were seeing in 2005 and 2006 were simply ridiculous and unsustainable.
“Iâ ™ll bet you donâ ™t even own a home.”
That’s a bet you will lose, my friend. I have owned a home in Bend for 22 years. Before that I owned homes in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and California. I have seen booms and busts before. It’s not the end of the world.
Coffee, snobby food, tourism and homebuilding……good luck Bend!
But … but … but … Bend is PARADISE! Everybody in the whole world wants to live here! They’ll pay ANYTHING to live here!
We’ve been repeating the propaganda so long that we’ve come to believe it ourselves — never a good idea …