Time to come up for air...

Some whales can remain submerged for long periods of time before coming up for air. The longest recorded whale dive on a single breath was just under two hours.

Many homeowners who found themselves under water on their mortgages have been holding their breath and trying to wait out the market. Some turned blue and went under in foreclosure. Others surfaced with a short sale breath. Many are still down there thinking that they must stay under longer. That may or may not be true anymore.

The real estate market has come back strong in some areas. The recovery has been spotty and in pockets. there are still area that had fallen so far that they'll take extra time to recover. Some areas truthfully may never really recover; however, there are pockets, like Milford, where the return of value has been fairly rapid and dramatic. Much of that quick run-up of prices can be attributed to the lack of inventory in the current market. That is being caused by those people who have their heads down and are still holding their breath.

The truth is that it is time to surface and take a breath, look around to see if your home is in one of the recovery pockets and maybe get on with life. If you haven't had a Realtor do a market analysis lately you may be holding your breath needlessly. That is especially true for people who did not buy or refinance at the peak of the real estate bubble market - 2005-6. If you bought in the late 1990's or even the earlier 2000's, you may be alright now. You won't know if you don't look and see.

There is no guarantee that you've recovered enough to sell, but you sure won't know if you do nothing. If you've been waiting to sell, so that you can get on with retirement or maybe look at that move up house or downsize house that you've been considering, this is step one.

Give me a call at 248-763-2497 and let's set up an appointment for me to do a FREE market analysis of your home (Southeastern Michigan residents only, please). I'll give you the straight answer to your question about your home's value on the current market and even provide some advice or tips on things that you might need to do to get it ready for sale (if that's what you want to do).

A tale of two townships - Green Oak and Hartland

Two of the townships that border on Milford, Michigan are in Livingston County on either side of Brighton. They are Green Oak, which is just west of Lyon Township in Oakland County and Hartland Township, which is just west of Highland Township. Green Oak and Hartland share some characteristics in common. They are both what might be considered to be "bedroom communities", that is to say that they don't have any strong central town/city/village downtown areas around which they revolve.

While Hartland Township does have an unincorporated little area that calls itself Hartland and another unincorporated area called Pharshallville, neither little "village area" has a strong downtown and were likely never much more than a small farm towns. There are few businesses in either to attract anyone. Green Oak has even less of what could be called a central core and was always a fairly rural area. I supposed that it could be argued that the Village of Whitmore Lake is Green Oak's "commercial center." Both tend to be heavily influenced by the City of Brighton, although both do have commercial, shopping strips. Green Oak is served by three different school districts - Brighton, Whitmore Lake and South Lyon - while Hartland does have its own consolidated school district.

One would assume that the real estate markets in these two little suburbs of Brighton would be fairly consistent with that of Brighton itself. In fact, Green Oak is not even tracked and reported separately from Brighton by the Altos Research folks, from whom I get my market charts. However, Hartland is reported separately and is on a completely different track than that of Brighton. The chart shows what appears to be a bottoming out of the market in Hartland after a sustained fall in median home values of sold homes and a continued drop in inventory.



The Green Oak market is included in the Brighton chart, which shows a remarkable recovery of median home prices late last year,, with a bit of leveling off early this year and a continuing decline in inventory.



So far this year, there have only been 31 homes sell in Green Oak Township above $20,000 (my arbitrary cut-off point for tracking purposes) at an average price of $84/Sq Ft and an SEV multiplier of 1.6206. That means that homes that the assessor says are worth $200,000 have been selling on average for about $162,000 in Green Oak or about 81% of the value that they are assessed for. Distressed sales - those that are short sales or foreclosures - made up 46% of all sales in Green Oak so far this year.

In Hartland Twonship, only 30 homes have sold thus far in 2011 at an average SEV multiplier of 1,6255 and at an average of $74/Sq Ft. Hartland has seen distressed sales of 53% of all sales so far this year.

Green Oak has benefited a bit from being out along the I-96 corridor, which makes is a good commuter location for those oriented towards Detroit for work. Hartland is along the M-59 and M-23 corridors, which is not nearly as accommodating for Detroit-oriented work commuters.