HometownGeorgetown.com

Later today, I’m going to show a buyer some homes for sale in the Villages of Berry Creek, so I decided that now would be a great time to feature this neighborhood. (Knowledge is power.)

There are 14 homes currently listed as Active on the marketplace. When I first started the search yesterday afternoon, there were 14 homes on the market. Then one of the homeowners who I called for a showing told me that they had just accepted an offer for their home. (Great news for them - after just ten days on the market!) So I thought there would only be 13 homes for this morning’s blog. But this morning, I woke up to find another new listing in the Villages of Berry Creek. Often, websites lag behind the MLS by as much as two or three weeks. This is another reason why you’d be wise to hire a REALTOR to help you find a new home. The market changes every single day, and REALTORS have the tools to be able to tell you what’s happening as soon as it happens. We’re required to enter status changes into the system within a very short time. Those changes are effective immediately in our MLS software, but it takes some time for all the websites out there to update themselves.

The homes currently on the market are priced from $165,000 up to just over $265,000. That’s a wide range of prices in the neighborhood. The most expensive home has been on the market for 266 days. In that time, the sellers have only lowered the price by about $300. (That’s not a typo.) What’s most interesting to me is that this home is owned by the builder, and I would expect builders to be more realistic about price. For some reason, the builder is not in a hurry to sell this home but is content to let it wait for the right buyer at this price.

Ten homes sold for between just over $170,000 and just under $235,000. The average sales price was $192,487. The homes spent an average of 115 days on the market. One poor house sat on the market for over 300 days. The sellers lowered the price by $30,000, and the home ended up selling for more than the final asking price. (Most likely, this was done with an FHA loan, so the price was adjusted upward in order for the sellers could pay the buyers closing costs.) Only one of these sales took place in October, and not a single sale took place in November of last year.

During the past six months, three homes were withdrawn from the marketplace, and seven listings expired without a sale. These sellers were unable or unwilling to lower the price on their homes, so they made the decision to hold onto it rather than lower the price. That’s a tough reality to face, and I really feel for these folks. A home is worth what a buyer is willing to pay for it, so all a seller can really do is decide whether that’s enough money to make it worth his or her while. Sometimes, the best decision is not to sell. The market will pick up, the prices will rise again.