Tuesday, December 9, 2008

A Difficult Selling Environment

Selling your home in today's real estate environment is certainly a challenging experience.

If you are trying to capture as much value as possible during the sale of your home, you have probably at least thought of trying to sell your house without the assistance of a realtor (For Sale by Owner) to avoid the 5-6% realtor's fee. The Longmeadow- For Sale by Owner service provided by LongmeadowBiz.com can provide an important component of your marketing plan. This service will certainly provide a cost effective method for getting the needed visibility for potential buyers.

In today's market, most home buyers (both local and long distance) are doing their own searches to find their new home through the Internet and their most likely starting point is Google search.

Because of the large number of home owners that have used the Longmeadow FSBO service and the high number of website visitors, Google search results for important key words related to the Longmeadow real estate market are very high…

Below are some examples… simply click on the link to view the Google results.

Longmeadow FSBO
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=longmeadow+fsbo
# 1 out of 13,300 results

Longmeadow house for sale by owner
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=longmeadow+house+for+sale+by+owner
# 1 out of 10,300 results


Longmeadow home for sale by owner
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=longmeadow+home+for+sale+by+owner
#1 out of 73,900 results

Longmeadow for sale by owner
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=longmeadow+for+sale+by+owner
#1 out of 23,400 results


The direct link to Longmeadow FSBO is: http://www.longmeadowbiz.com/realestate/index.htm

For humor to make things a little less stressful in this difficult time, view the following video....



If you are looking to sell your Longmeadow house via FSBO, please consider using our Longmeadow- FSBO service as part of your marketing plan. You will be glad that you did!

Jim Moran
LongmeadowBiz, LLC
www.LongmeadowBiz.com

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Latest Longmeadow Home Sales Results

Shown below are a series of charts summarizing recent single family home sales for Longmeadow, Massachusetts. These results include both MLS and FSBO transactions and are based upon public information obtained from the Hampden County Registrar of Deeds website.

The bargraph below shows that the number of Longmeadow home sales from January through November 2008 were significantly lower (-19.5%) vs. results for the corresponding periods in 2007 and 2006 (149 transactions in 2008 vs. 185 in 2007 and 183 in 2006).




[click chart to enlarge]









A bright spot in the latest data is that home sales results for the latest five months (July through November 2008) were equivalent to the same period in 2007 and only slightly lower than that for 2006 (85 transactions vs. 85 and 89).

Median prices remained stable in November (see chart below). However, the current median price ($306,000) is still significantly lower (-12.9%) than the peak reached in September 2007 ($350,000).






[click chart to enlarge]







Current home inventory and sales figures indicate the average "time to sell" a home in Longmeadow remained at ~ 10-12 months.

Hopefully, all of the recent activity in Washington about reducing mortgage rates and helping stem the large increases in foreclosures will finally bring a bottom to this difficult real estate market.