My world and welcome to it...

As I have done numerous times before, it is time to report on the mix in the local market here in my little corner of the world. Actually this is a report for a far bigger area than I normally concentrate upon, since these statistics were provided by my company - Real Estate One - and reflect the entire southeastern Michigan market.

The chart shows that almost 80% of the local market is still being drive by distressed sales or sale (leases really) that were caused mainly by distress (displaced homeowners looking for places to live after being foreclosed). In this are almost 50% of all listings are traditional homeowners trying to sell; however, only 21% of the sales are actually made from homes in that category.

As expected, the end of the first-time buyer tax credit had a dramatic impact on May sales which were down 30% over the March-April rate.

Price is still king in this market, with homes that were well priced selling quickly and those that were not languishing on the market until they have been reduced one of more times. An example is in the under $100K market, well priced houses that never needed a price reduction sold with an average DOM of 52 days. Those that required one or more price reductions averaged 155 days on market. At the upper end, houses over $400K that were well priced sold in an average of 158 days and those that started out overpriced were over a year on the market at 373 DOM.

So, we're not out of the woods yet. In fact we can't really even see the edge of the woods yet. The little clearing that we thought we saw in March and April was an illusion. So far the HARP/HAMP/HAFA programs have been a big disappointment; as the banks continue to play games with short sales and prefer to foreclose, rather than work with distressed homeowners. Next, we're awaiting the long anticipated dump of the "shadow inventory" of foreclosed properties onto the market by stressed out banks.