Even in a hot real estate market like we have today, it is still important for sellers to price their homes accurately from the start. If you are a homeowner thinking about selling, it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking you can get away with over pricing your home as buyers are desperate, but that is just not so. Don’t get me wrong, you should be able to sell your home for every dollar that it is worth, and perhaps even a tad more, but only if your home is priced and marketed accurately from the start. Continue Reading →
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If you want to start a debate amount the real estate community that will go on forever and most likely not have the participants reach a consensus, just bring up the topic of my headline: Does the commission rate offered to a buyers agent affect how much a listing will sell for or how quickly it will sell? Without getting into any philosophical or ideaoligcal debate on the topic, I wanted to just look at the data to reveal what it shows on the topic. With this in mind, I pulled MLS data from our database for homes sold in Continue Reading → The median price per square foot of homes sold in St Louis County have increased 3.5% over the past 10 years, from $116 per foot in 2007 to $120 per foot currently. As the chart below illustrates, home prices dipped to a low of $90 per foot in 2011, a result of the housing bubble burst in 2008. During the same period, the price per foot of homes sold in St Charles County increased 5.1% from $117 per foot in 2007 to $123 per foot currently. Like St Louis County, St Charles County saw home prices bottom out in 2011, hitting a low of $95 per foot. Continue Reading → In many parts of the country it is typical for homes not to have a basement but here in St Louis, we love our basements and it is typically harder to sell a home without one. St Louisan’s like the safety offered by a basement in times of bad storms and during the threat of tornadoes, but also like the opportunity to add some additional, and fairly affordable, living space to their homes. Continue Reading → As the chart below shows, there were 2,880 homes sold last month within the 5-county core St Louis market (city of St Louis and counties of St Louis, St Charles, Jefferson and Franklin) an increase of 6.5% from March 2016 when there were 2,705 homes sold. Continue Reading → Yesterday, I did a post on the 10 St Louis neighborhoods that made it in the Niche list of “100 Best Places to Live In America”. This prompted a question as to how much better price appreciation have home owners seen in these neighborhoods as a result of the features they have that make them the “best places to live” verses the normal appreciation for the area? Since it just so happens that all ten of the neighborhoods that made the list are in St Louis county, I decided to pull a chart to compare the median price per foot (the most accurate way to compare home prices) of homes sold in the top ten neighborhoods versus St Louis County as a whole. As the chart below illustrates, here is what I found when I looked at home prices from January 1, 2012 (around the bottom of the market after the housing bubble burst in 2008) through the end of 2016: Continue Reading → Niche, a website that gives rankings and profiles of schools and neighborhoods throughout the U.S., recently released it’s list of the 100 best places to live in America, 10 of which, were in the St Louis area! Coming in at 18 on the list, and the best-ranked St Louis area, was Clayton followed by Creve Coeur at number 20. The complete list of the St Louis neighborhoods that made the list of best places to live, along with their ranking on the list by Niche is below. Continue Reading → The supply of homes for sale continues to be a major impediment to the St Louis real estate market! This month, as the video below shows, every county in the St Louis core market area has seen the inventory of homes for sale (in terms of months of supply) decline from last month and last month was already low! In spite of the low, low inventory, home prices have remained reasonable and, in fact, we are seeing a little bit of a downward trend price-wise in some areas. With these things in mind, along with the fact that interest rates are sure to go up, there’s no better time to buy or sell than now! Continue Reading → Real estate agents should be on the lookout for a phishing scam disguised as a real estate lead from Realtor.com. A phishing scam involves sending emails that look to be from a real, reputable company, but are not, in order to get the recipient to reveal personal information , such as credit card numbers, email passwords, etc so the scammer can use the information for some fraudulent purpose. Over the past couple of years real estate agents have been a specific target of these scammers. Real estate agents are targeted in an effort to obtain the agents email password so the scammer can then send a phony email to the agents clients tricking them into wiring money to the fraudsters account rather than the title company for a closing. Continue Reading → During the first quarter of 2017, the foreclosure rate in the St Louis metro area was one in every 487 housing units, a decline of 19.59 percent from the quarter before, and a decline of 3.61 percent from a year ago, according to a report released today by Attom Data. Continue Reading → The supply of homes for sale in St Louis continues to fall making it even more of a challenge for the home buyers out there while making it pretty easy on sellers. For the past couple of years we have seen homes, that were properly priced and marketed correctly, sell often on the first day, or within the fist few days, of coming on the market for sale. In fact, more and more it’s become common for homes to sell before actually even hitting the market officially. Continue Reading → The St Louis real estate market has been a fast-selling seller’s market in many areas for what seems like a long time now. Currently, the fastest selling city within the St Louis area is Warson Woods where homes for sale there have been on the market just an average of 7 days, followed by Valley Park at 16 days. As the table below, with the 15 fastest selling neighborhoods, shows, the “slowest” fastest-selling neighborhood on the list, Webster Groves, is at 49 days for the average time current listings have been for sale there. Continue Reading → It seems almost crazy to even throw out the idea of an adjustment in St Louis home prices or, perhaps even, any sort of slow down in the rate of home price appreciation given that the inventory of homes for sale is so low in so many parts of the St Louis area, however, maybe it’s something to look at. Continue Reading → New home sales in St Louis declined in 2016 after increasing during the prior two years, for both the entire St Louis MSA as a whole as well as the St Louis 5-County Core Market. Continue Reading → As I have discussed a few times over the past couple of years, the home ownership rate in the United States has been on the decline, finally reaching an historic low in 2016 at 63.4%. However, during the same time, the Hispanic home ownership rate increased from 45.4% in 2014 to 46% in 2016, according to the 2016 State of Hispanic Ownership Report. Continue Reading → The median price of homes sold in the St Louis core housing market (city of St Louis and counties of St Louis, St Charles, Jefferson and Franklin) was $179,900 for the past 12 months, an increase of 5.2% from the prior 12 month period when the median price of St Louis homes sold was $171,000. Continue Reading → There just aren’t enough homes for sale in many price ranges! This month, like many months before, you will see that all five counties in the St Louis core market (city of St Louis and the counties of St Louis, St Charles, Jefferson and Franklin) all have less than a 6 month supply of homes for sale (a few less than half of that), so it remains a sellers market in many areas! While the market is doing well, you will notice the trend over the past 24 months, as I describe in the video is down a little in terms of number of homes sales which is due simply the lack of homes available for sale. There doesn’t appear to be a shortage of buyers at this point, just a shortage of sellers. Continue Reading → The percentage of people in St Louis with a sub-prime credit score (below 660) has continued to improve since peaking in most St Louis area counties around 2008, according to the latest data released by Equifax. As the interactive map below shows, 30.63% of the people in the city of St Louis had sub-prime credit in the 4th quarter of 2016. This is a decline from the 4th quarter of 2008 when it was 38.42% and even down from 2006, the year of the peak of the St Louis housing market, when 34.21% of people in the city of St Louis had sub-prime credit. Continue Reading → Happy home builders? Wow, I remember those days, back before the real estate bubble and market collapse, boy were those the days! Well, the good news is, while builders still have their challenges, according to the latest survey by the National Association of Home Builders, builders in the Midwest are more optimistic about the new home market than they have ever been! (or, at least since the beginning of the regional level index records that are published). Continue Reading → So my headline is a rhetorical question and I personally don’t think landlords and tenants are bad people but, after seeing so many municipalities work so hard over the past few years passing ordinances that, in many cases, in my humble opinion, just tramples the property rights of landlords as well as the rights of tenants, one would have to believe that landlords and tenants must be some pretty bad people. After all, if not, why would some municipalities work so hard to discourage them from entering their cities and work hard to chase them out? Continue Reading → The St Louis real estate market continues to be strong and, thanks for a low inventory of homes for sale in many areas, competitive. Accurately priced homes in popular neighborhoods often sell within a day or two of coming on the market. Listings in the fastest selling cities in St Louis spend an average of less than 30 days on the market. As the table below shows, the fastest selling city currently is Glendale (which has spent a lot of time at the top of this list over the last few months) with an average of just 23 days on the market for current listings, followed by Valley Park with an average listing time of 26 days. Continue Reading → The St Louis downtown loft market had a slow start back in the early 90’s and then picked up some steam later in the 90’s when Missouri launched its historic tax credit program. The loft market, as the chart below illustrates, peaked in 2005, stalling out before the majority of the residential hit its peak in 2006. The St Louis loft market saw a kind of double peak with prices rising in 2007 after dipping the year before, but then loft prices followed suit with the rest of the market and started a long slow decline until hitting bottom in 2011. Continue Reading → An ever-increasing number of aging baby boomers are becoming empty nesters and coming to the realization they no longer need that 3, 4 or even 5 bedroom home they own. In addition, many of them, also find themselves tired of the upkeep that comes with the big house on the large lot. These issues, along with a desire for a lifestyle change, has led to a growing demand for alternative types of housing including condominiums and villas with the latter being the most popular. What exactly is a “villa”? The interesting thing is, even though the demand for villa’s has Continue Reading → St Louis is known as an affordable place to live so it is not surprising that there is a fairly robust housing market for affordable and moderate priced homes. When it comes to luxury homes in St Louis however ($500,000 and above for the sake of discussion here), the market is much cooler. Continue Reading → Last year was a good year for the St Louis real estate market and, thus far, 2017 is off to a pretty good start in St Louis as well! As the chart and tables below illustrates, home prices in the St Louis area have been trending upward over the past couple of years and sales are holding pretty steady. Continue Reading → Investors that rental property may find their best returns, relative to the price of the homes they buy, in the City of St Louis, according to some county-level rental data compiled by MORE, REALTORS. As the tables below illustrate, over the past 12 months the median price of homes sold in the City of St Louis was $106.57 per square foot and the median annualized price per foot homes lease for was $11.04 which works out to a gross annual return on investment of 10.4%, the highest of the four St Louis area counties we looked at. Continue Reading → The ranch-style home has been around a long time with it’s origin going back to 1920’s but this style of home became extremely popular in the 1940’s carrying through the 1970’s. Ranch-style homes are normally much wider than deep and feature open floor plans with a casual style. Over time, as incomes increased, as did ground cost making the rather large footprint of a ranch more expensive since it needed a larger not to accommodate it, 1.5 and 2-story homes became increasingly popular. Recently, it seems there has been somewhat of a resurgence in terms of interest in ranch-style homes Continue Reading → According to the annual Environmental Hazard Housing Risk Index Report, the St Louis zip code of 63133 has the 7th highest Environmental Hazard Housing Risk Index in the nation. The report, just released this morning by ATTOM Data Solutions, compiles data on homes and condos in zip codes with a high, or very high risk for at least one of four environmental hazards: Superfunds, brown fields, polluters or poor air quality. Continue Reading → While the bulk of the St Louis area spent most of the past year as a sellers market, real estate is very local and very seasonal, so there are still neighborhoods where buyers markets exist! So where are the buyers markets? Well, they are a constantly moving target due to the fluctuations I just mentioned, however, currently, as the list below illustrates, Continue Reading → As a real estate broker and former real estate developer and builder, I’m surprised how many transactions I see in which a new home buyer forgoes a private building inspection thinking, since the home is new, an inspection is not necessary. Continue Reading → |
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