2014 Year-End Recap – Montrose CO Real Estate

Interest rates and loans, that’s another thing that comes up I have people asking me all the time is anybody getting loans anymore? The answer is absolutely, as long as you have a decent job and you have decent credit. I still have buyers all the time who are getting a hundred percent financing. They’re not putting any money down. Now, the difference is, everyone is going through a rigorous process to actually get to closing, so every day the lenders ask for new paperwork the day of closing they’re calling the employer making sure that they’re employed even after closing. So, it’s definitely gotten stricter, but people are still getting loans. Interest rates have been about 4 to 4.5% all year. We really thought they were going to shoot up, we kept hearing they’re going to shoot up, but they’ve hung tight. I really don’t foresee them staying where they’re at forever. With changes that are happening at the federal level, I don’t see them staying, but it’s helping our situation when it comes to buying and selling. Property appraisals right now – I can only gauge on what I’ve experienced, so I think with about 50 sales so far that I’ve been a part of, I have only had one of those have an issue with an appraisal. I knew it going into it that this thing should have been priced at $350,000 and it was at $410,000, so I knew we were going to have trouble, but the rest of them, somehow, I think the sellers are getting a little more realistic about their prices and so they realized okay for a buyer to get a loan, there again it’s going to have to appraise, it needs to stay pretty close. So I’m not really seeing too many deals fall apart because of issues with the appraisal.

This is just stats on what we’re seeing at the Montrose Association of Realtors. So in the third quarter, we had 265 new homes come on the market. That’s a lot, but last year we had 285. So, we have less inventory that came on the market in the last quarter than we did last year. Also, total homes on the market right now as of the third quarter are at 462. So last year, that number was 487, so that tells me we’ve got less people putting their houses on the market. Some of it is third quarter people start thinking: I’m flying south, I’m going to Arizona, taking my house off the market. You know the market is not good in the winter I’m taking it off, so that’s some of it, but, you know, I kind of like having less inventory because it does help our prices come up. One thing I wanted to point out is the percentage of list price received. So this year, the percentage that sellers are getting on their houses is 95.9 percent. So, they’re having to come down on their price about 4%. Last year, they only had to come down on their price 3%. So that tells me there is a little bit of encouragement in the market that sellers are feeling like they can press their houses higher, whereas we saw our prices are barely up from last year. They haven’t shot up. So, if you price your house high enough you’re going to end up having to come down a bigger percentage, so that’s what we’re seeing there.”