Saturday, August 2, 2008

Longmeadow Foreclosures Are Increasing- Part II

My recent post on this subject- "Longmeadow Foreclosures are Increasing" had the right title but the posted data was not accurate.

A second visit to the Hampden County Register of Deeds website found a summary of foreclosures by town for the FY2008 (ending 6/30/08) . Below is the data for Longmeadow as compared to East Longmeadow and Wilbraham.













Source: Hampden County Register of Deeds website.
Here is a link to the July 2008
summary written by Donald E. Ashe, Hampden County Register of Deeds

The reported increase in the number of foreclosures in Longmeadow is still a very low percentage of the total number of homes (8 out of 5500 = 0.15%) and should not be a concern to Longmeadow homeowners worried about their property values.

Some Good News for Longmeadow Real Estate

“Home Prices Fell in 23 of 25 U.S. Metro Areas in May”
“Paulson Says Stimulus Worked, But Housing Still Correcting”
“US Housing Prices: When's the Bottom?”
“Worst Residential Real Estate Market Since Man First Walked on the Moon!”
“Housing relief bill unlikely to help those in most trouble”

The theme of continuing gloom and doom in the above news headlines continued to dominate the news media this past week and if you are trying to sell a house in this environment, it can get pretty depressing.

There is some good news in the latest July sales results for Longmeadow.

As shown in the chart below the number of Longmeadow home sales increased dramatically to 27 in July from 16 in June. Comparison of July results from one year ago also showed much stronger home sales results (27 vs. 18). However, because of the weak results for the first six months of 2008, 2008 YTD results are still down 23% vs. 2007 YTD results.














[click to enlarge]

As shown in the chart below there are some encouraging signs on median prices where for the fourth consecutive month the median sales price remained stable at ~ $300,000.














[click to enlarge]

Some housing experts have indicated that the first signs of a bottom in the housing crisis will be price stabilization and increased home sales. In Longmeadow, it appears that this is happening…. Hopefully, this is the beginning of the return of some normalcy to our local real estate market.

Stay tuned for further developments by visiting Real Estate Buzz at LongmeadowBiz.