| Address | Listing Price | Selling Price |
| 15 North Road | $389,000 | $375,000 |
| 7 Old Farm Road | $549,000 | $555,000 |
| 14 Brady Road | $599,999 | $572,000 |
| 6 Kenquit Road | $669,000 | $660,000 |
| 132 Smoke Rise Drive | $749,900 | $737,500 |
| 66 Green Valley Drive | $829,900 | $755,000 |
| 14 Nottingham Way | $885,000 | $865,000 |
| 30 Briarwood Drive E | $949,000 | $951,000 |
| 3 Ponds Edge Lane | $1,075,000 | $960,000 |
| 2 Darkwood Court | $1,149,000 | $1,090,000 |
| 9 Foxglove Drive | $1,199,000 | $1,150,000 |
| 47 Sneider Road | $1,249,000 | $1,225,000 |
| Address | Listing Price | Selling Price |
| 6 Willow Avenue | $275,000 | $275,000 |
| 14 Pheasant Run | $724,900 | $698,000 |
| 10 Sheephill Drive | $1,475,000 | $1,287,000 |
| Address | Listing Price | Selling Price |
| Mendham Borough | ||
| 4 Gunther Street | $679,000 | $654,000 |
| 13 Forest Drive | $849,000 | $814,000 |
| 24 Coventry Road | $1,150,000 | $1,145,000 |
| 9 Kerby Lane | $1,970,000 | $1,774,000 |
| Mendham Township | ||
| 4 Hunters Glen | $825,000 | $787,500 |
| 10 Ballantine Road | $869,999 | $845,000 |
| 1 Cedar Lane | $975,000 | $975,000 |
| 35 Horizon Drive | $1,059,000 | $975,000 |
| 8 Cherry Lane | $1,099,000 | $1,099,000 |
| 1 Woodlawn Terrace | $1,195,000 | $1,165,000 |
| 7 Wright Lane | $1,899,000 | $1,761,025 |
| Address | Listing Price | Selling Price |
| 1235 Long Hill Road | $438,500 | $425,000 |
| 86 Magnolia Avenue | $489,000 | $480,000 |
June Pending Home Sales Fall To Record Low
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Contracts for pending sales of previously owned homes fell to a record low in June as buyers sat on the sidelines, a survey from the National Association of Realtors showed on Tuesday.
The Realtors said its Pending Home Sales Index, based on contracts signed in June, fell to a record low 75.7 from a revised 77.7 in May. Economists polled by Reuters had expected a rise of 0.6 percent.
“We really need to see stronger job creation to have a meaningful recovery in the housing markets,” said NAR chief economist Lawrence Yun, adding “there could be a couple of additional months of slow home-sales activity before picking up later in the year” if the job market improves.
Aside from reflecting the state of the national economy, the article raises the question of what’s been going on in the Somerset Hills market area recently.
While we’ve been very fortunate to have had a fairly strong spring season, what will a closer look at the July sales numbers tell us? Stay tuned for the next few posts to see the answers…
Earlier this year 27 students at Old Dominion University pressed their foreheads into a padded frame and peered ahead, much like patients at an eye doctor. They scrolled through pictures of 10 on-the-market homes on a computer screen as an ocular tracking program recorded their eye movements. In some of the homes, for some of the students, the living rooms were painted pink.
The question: Would a pink room-a problem you could fix for the price of a few cans of paint-make the students less likely to purchase the homes? The answer, based on preliminary results, is yes.
The study is part of a growing body of research that is putting real estate under the microscope. Scientists are finding that psychology-everything from how a buyer perceives his agent to how a seller prices her home-plays an unexpectedly large role. “When the market was going up, these questions were mildly interesting,” says Michael Seiler, a professor of real estate at Old Dominion University and the coauthor of numerous studies in the field (including the one about the pink room). Today, with the market wobbly, “they’re much more relevant,” and the results of such research, he and other academics say, can offer useful insights to buyers and sellers alike.
Here’s a roundup of some pertinent findings.
Choose Your Words Carefully
For a seller, advertising that you’ve recently painted your house seems like a no-brainer. But in a study that looked at nearly 60,000 residential real estate transactions in Texas, listings that mentioned new paint, new carpet and/or roof work sold, on average, for slightly less than those that did not.
Thomas A. Thomson, the study’s coauthor and the director of the Real Estate Finance and Development Program at the University of Texas at San Antonio, says that buyers aren’t going to be fooled by a problem house simply because it has a fresh coat of paint. “It’s kind of like putting lipstick on a pig,” he says. But even if there’s nothing wrong with the house, an advertisement that touts new features could set off alarm bells. If a seller says everything is new, a buyer might wonder why everything needed to be replaced-and whether there are other defects lurking.
Thomson recommends sellers take the simpler route: Let potential buyers be surprised by the quality of the home instead of disappointed by how average it is compared with its description.
Looks Do Count
Do buyers pay more when sellers’ real estate agents are attractive? Apparently so: Preliminary results of a study from Old Dominion University suggest that, put bluntly, the more attractive a male finds his female agent, the higher the price he’ll probably be willing to pay. Women also seem to be susceptible to attractive female agents, although not to the degree that men are. (Neither women nor men seem to respond much to attractive males.) “I’d like to think I wouldn’t fall prey to it,” says Seiler. “But I think that the people who were in our study would have said the exact same thing.”
Welcome, Out-of-Towners!
Out-of-state buyers tend to pay more than locals for properties of equal value, particularly when they come from states with higher real estate prices, according to a study from Brigham Young University. Researchers looked at apartment sales in the Phoenix metropolitan area-2,854 transactions from 1990 to 2002-and found that, on average, out-of-state buyers paid more than 5 percent more than their in-state counterparts.
BYU’s Grant McQueen says it often makes economic sense for out-of-state buyers to find homes fast, even if it means shelling out more money than if they shopped more or negotiated longer. Otherwise, they can end up paying more in travel costs than they save on the price of the home. The other reason, though, is less rational: In what’s known as “anchoring,” buyers tend to pay more for a home when they’re used to paying a higher price elsewhere.
The Downside of Upbeat
A big part of any decision to sell a house is where a homeowner thinks prices are heading. So how do owners feel after the brutal market of the past few years? Surprisingly-perhaps naively-optimistic. A recent survey of 479 homeowners in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas found that people were about five times more likely to say their own homes would see their prices increase in the next 12 months than they were to say their neighbors’ homes would do better.
Robert Shiller, a professor at Yale University, and Karl Case, a professor at Wellesley College, survey homeowners every year to gauge how confident they are that their homes will increase in value. Only once, when the housing market was at its worst in the recent crash, did the poll results slide into the negative. In general, the average respondent figured his home was bound to jump in value in the near future. “People don’t change their opinions that quickly,” says Shiller.
Whether they’ll regret those opinions later, only time will tell. If his expectations are out of whack with reality, an overoptimistic seller could wind up waiting for a higher price that will never arrive. But pessimists should tread just as carefully: An overly downbeat seller could wind up dumping a house at a price far below what it could fetch a year or two later.
http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/the-psychology-of-real-estate.html
Mortgage Rates Hit New Record Low
Freddie Mac says the average rate for 30-year fixed loans this week was 4.56 percent, down from 4.57 last week. That’s the lowest since Freddie Mac began tracking rates in 1971.
The rate on the 15-year fixed loan dropped to 4.03 percent, down from 4.06 percent last week and the lowest on record.
The US dollar is still viewed as a safe haven, despite best efforts of the Fed and Congress.
Buyer psychology, e.g. confidence, is still key to a revived housing market. So, how’re you feeling?
RISMEDIA, July 22, 2010—Single-family housing starts were virtually unchanged from the previous month at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 454,000 units in June 2010, according to newly-released figures by the U.S. Commerce Department. Meanwhile, a 21.5% decline on the more volatile multifamily side weighed down the overall housing production number, which fell 5% to a 549,000-unit rate.
“As our most recent member surveys have indicated, builders remain very cautious in light of the sluggish pace of the economic recovery and the hesitancy they are seeing among potential home buyers,” noted Bob Jones, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and a home builder from Bloomfield Hills, Mich. “However, today’s report is actually somewhat encouraging, because it indicates that single-family production is stabilizing following an expected lull that occurred with the end of the home buyer tax credit program.”
“The government’s figures suggest that single-family housing production may be finding a bottom following the tax credits,” agreed NAHB Vice President and Senior Economist Bernard Markstein. “Over the next several months, we expect to see some improvement in both housing starts and sales activity as buyers come forward to take advantage of the very attractive home prices, historically low mortgage rates and excellent selection that characterize today’s new-home marketplace. However, builders continue to confront significant challenges in obtaining financing for viable new projects, and this problem remains a formidable obstacle to economic growth.”
Nearly all of the 5% decline in housing production was on the multifamily side this June, which fell 21.5% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 95,000 units. Meanwhile, single-family starts hardly budged, with a 0.7% decline to 454,000 units. All four regions posted declines in overall housing production, with an 11.3% reduction in the Northeast, a 6.9% decline in the Midwest, a 2.4% decline in the South and a 5.9% decline in the West.
Meanwhile, nationwide permit issuance, an indicator of future building activity, rose 2.1% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 586,000 units in June. While single-family permits fell 3.4% to 421,000 units for the month, that decline was due entirely to a drop-off in the South, with every other region holding steady or better on the single-family side. Multifamily permits rose 19.6% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 165,000 units in June. Combined single- and multifamily permit issuance was up 32.3% in the Northeast, down 10.8% in the Midwest, down 3.1% in the South and up 9.7% in the West in June.
http://rismedia.com/2010-07-21/single-family-housing-starts-virtually-unchanged-in-june-2010/print/
I knew mortgage underwriting requirements over the past couple of years have gotten much tighter, but I didn’t realize they’d gotten this tight:
Seeking A Mortgage? Don’t Get Pregnant
Back in the slapdash days of easy credit, lenders were more likely to overlook the fact that a parent was out on maternity or paternity leave. But now that lenders have become more conservative, they are requiring new parents to jump through more hoops to prove their income will be enough to cover the mortgage.
Did you happen to catch the Timothy Geithner interview on the PBS NewsHour this week? The United States Treasury secretary must have used the word “confidence” a dozen times.
And no wonder. Boosting the confidence of Americans in the US economy right now is critical to fend off a stalled recovery or even a double dip into another recession.
Consumer confidence is wilting under scorching headlines about slow job growth, debt jitters, and a lackluster stock market. After rising for three months, consumer confidence fell sharply in June.
Businesses are wary, too. They don’t like new health-care and financial requirements. They’re not sure what’s going to happen to energy legislation and energy costs. They wonder what tax increases and/or spending cuts might lie ahead. Meanwhile, Washington has suddenly put a brake on more stimulus.
The country’s spirits need lifting. But how do you do that?
One way is for Americans to balance bad news with encouraging signs. For instance, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) now forecasts that the world economy will grow faster than expected. This week it raised its 2010 global growth estimate to 4.6 percent. Emerging markets – China, India, Latin America, and even Africa – look strong.
Notice, too, that world financial markets have stopped hyperventilating over the Greek debt crisis. That’s because European countries are taking action to (a) strengthen their currency, and (b) reduce deficits and debt.
And let’s step back from the day-to-day headlines for a minute: The US economy has been growing for a year now (the IMF forecasts a 2010 growth rate of 3.35 percent). Jobs have increased for six months. Incomes are rising. And housing prices have been more or less stable for a long time.
One of the problems with confidence-building is “the waiting game.” Consumers wait for better job numbers before spending; businesses wait for more consumer spending before hiring.
But it’s quite possible to break the habit of waiting for someone else to act. If businesses are discouraged by weak consumer spending by Americans, they can reorient themselves to export markets – and create US jobs in the process. President Obama could help here by aggressively pushing Congress to pass free-trade deals with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama.
If companies are discouraged by mismatched skills of workers, they can invest more of their profits in job training and community colleges (businesses are sitting on about $1.8 trillion in cash as they wait for consumers to spend more).
Americans, meanwhile, can do their own reorienting by moving to areas with better job prospects and by learning new skills. They can also look again at the skills they do have and sell them more creatively – on the Internet, for instance, or on a contract or freelance basis.
And even while “government” waits for this year’s elections, politicians at the state and federal level can do what the country longs for: pledge to work across party lines to tackle long-term debt that is fueled by health-care and retirement costs.
It may look to many like a scary and risky time for the country. But it’s actually full of opportunity. Mortgage rates are at a historic low, perfect for refinancing and improving a household’s cash flow, or for buying a first home.
The stock market got you down? Remember that automatic 401k deductions are purchasing more shares at these lower prices – and investors looking to buy companies will find them more affordable.
Economic value originates in ideas, and America has no shortage of those. Now is the time to act on them.
