REAL ESTATE SALES BOUNCING BACK ON SANIBEL !!!

John R. Wood Island Real Estate 1st quarter statistics 2011


Up 7% in sales volume

Up 15% in units closed

Up 27% in pending sales





Current Pending Sales Activity 2011 Residential total #’s

4/6 3/23 3/16 3/8 2/24 2/17

34 34 34 40 30 31



Pending Sanibel 2011 Condominiums total #’s

4/6 3/23 3/16 3/8 2/24

33 31 30 24 16



Metrostudy: Housing shortage on the horizon?

WASHINGTON – April 1, 2011 – Mike Castleman, founder and CEO of Metrostudy, which tracks real-time data of the country’s inventory of new homes, says a housing shortage is looming that will soon create a huge surge in demand for new homes. As such, now is the time to buy, he says.



In the 41 cities Metrostudy covers, 78,000 houses are either vacant and for sale, or under construction – that is less than a quarter of the new homes that fell in that category during the housing boom in 2006 and way below the level of a decade ago.



“If we had anything like normal levels of buying, those houses would sell in 2½ months,” says Castleman. “We’d see an incredible shortage. And that’s where we’re heading.”

Selling your home? Drop the nines

MADISON, Wis. – March 31, 2011 – While many Realtors continue to use 9’s in their asking pricing – setting a price of $499,999 or $599,000, for instance, to make buyers think they’re paying less – the strategy can actually minimize marketing exposure now that buyers typically use search engines to look for properties.



The search engines group properties in 0’s, 25’s, 50s, and 75’s, so Realtors would be wise to revise their pricing strategies accordingly. For example, a property with a price of $399,000 will be seen by buyers searching for homes up to $400,000; but buyers searching for a home between, say, $400,000 and $500,000 won’t see it.



Sellers should understand that buyers set the value of the home, and they should be more concerned about pricing the property correctly the first time.



Vacation- and investment-home shares hold even in 2010

WASHINGTON – March 30, 2011 – The market share of vacation- and investment-home sales held steady in 2010, although the sales volume declined with the overall market, according to the National Association of Realtors® (NAR).



NAR’s 2011 Investment and Vacation Home Buyers Survey, covering existing- and new-home transactions in 2010, shows vacation-home sales accounted for 10 percent of transactions last year while the portion of investment sales was 17 percent – both unchanged from 2009.



“Despite extraordinarily tight credit conditions for purchasing a second home, the market share for vacation and investment homes held steady,” says NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun. “A sizeable number of buyers made deals with all-cash offerings.”



All-cash purchases have become prevalent in the second-home market in recent years: 59 percent of investment buyers paid cash in 2010, as did 36 percent of vacation-home buyers.



With an overall decline in home sales during 2010, the volume of 543,000 vacation-home sales was down 1.8 percent from 553,000 in 2009. Investment purchases fell 7.8 percent to 867,000 in 2010 from 940,000 the previous year. Primary residence sales declined 5.6 percent to 3.81 million from 4.04 million in 2009.



Foreclosure or trustee sales accounted for 17 percent of investment purchases and 11 percent of vacation-home sales in 2010, compared with 5 percent of primary purchases.



“Second home buyers purchased more distressed homes at discount than did buyers of primary residences,” Yun says.



The median vacation-home price was $150,000 in 2010, down 11.2 percent from $169,000 in 2009, while the median investment-home price was $94,000, which is 10.5 percent below the $105,000 median in 2009. By contrast, the median primary residence price declined a relatively modest 4.5 percent to $176,700 last year from $185,000 in 2009.



The typical vacation-home buyer in 2010 was 49 years old, had a median household income of $99,500 and purchased a property that was a median distance of 375 miles from his or her primary residence; 31 percent of vacation homes were within 100 miles and 41 percent were more than 500 miles.

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