If you follow news about residential real estate on a regular basis, no doubt your head is spinning trying to make sense of it all. So much seems contradictory from day to day, if not hour to hour. As pointed out in this space repeatedly, there is no monolithic “real estate market” nationally or even regionally. Each town and price range has its own story to tell. Perhaps, though, this is telling in and of itself; when the markets were booming, they seemed to be booming everywhere indeed.
The good news is that now that the boom years have ebbed, it is not necessarily bad all over. Recent news indicates that Boston-area home values are up for their second month in a row and, as expert Karl Case points out in a summation of the recent look at the S&P Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the regional values are only 15.3 percent off their 2005 peaks. “Only?” you might sarcastically ask. Well, the peaks were the peaks, right? In the real world, this is solid, and solidity is something most people will take nowadays. And if you examine some of the healthier local markets within the region, the news is even better.
And the fall is generally a good time to list your home. While spring is the height of the real estate market in terms of activity level with more listings and more buyers out there looking, the fall offers fewer buyers, to be certain, but also far less competition for sellers.
Read the rest of my new post here.
