St. Louis Real Estate-Market Watch October 18th, 2008

Saint Louis Real Estate Market Watch by Art Wagner @ Keller Williams Realty Southwest, Sunset Hills, Mo.
October 18th, 2008
The Anatomy of St. Louis Real Estate

The St. Louis Home for Sale Team provides a weekly St. Louis County and Bi-weekly St. Charles County Market and Jefferson County Market Watch Report to review and plug into your home buying or selling scenario. Your questions and comments are welcome!

The St. Louis Real Estate Market this week shows a very small increase in activity with a few more homes accepting contracts, coupled with less active listings, which has pushed our pending ratio up to 11.33 percent. Our number of homes sold in the past six months continues to decline with an increase in expired or market rejected listings.

The buyers we’ve talked with this week are still taking “stock”, literally of their positions with their investments and how the last several weeks of the stock market’s decline affects their cash positions and their home buying power. With the election so close now, some are electing to wait until after the election, while others are forging ahead with buying decisions.

We are encouraging those buyers who are forging ahead with their purchases to contact their lenders to make certain they are still “good to go” with their pre-approval for their mortgage. This is also a time when it would be wise to have a second lender set up and ready to go, just in case challenges present themselves in the mortgage process.

Sellers in the market now should stay on the market. This is the time of year when some buyer activity will fall off, but the buyers that remain in the market are the motivated buyers. With almost 1000 less active listings for motivated buyers to look at this year as compared to last year, motivated buyers have less to choose from. That’s great news for sellers, as you will have a better chance of selling your home, as long as you are priced within market value, OR a bit below market value. It’s all about being the BEST in your price range.

Also, just because the Government has injected capital into a number of the largest banks around the country doesn’t mean the problems are over. This cash infusion isn’t going to help people who are already facing pre-foreclosure, foreclosure or having to sell their home for less than their mortgage. In the coming months, help for these situations may get a little easier, but none-the-less, many of these homeowners need help NOW.

In our St. Louis Market, there are only a select number of realtors that have become experts at helping these challenged homeowners. Many realtors in our area don’t want to get involved with foreclosures or short sales, as these transactions are much different than “traditional” real estate transactions, and usually take a bit more time and work.

At The St. Louis Real Estate Voice, we have positioned ourselves to be able to help these challenged homeowners by getting involved in a number of these transactions and building a team of experts around us to help make these “untraditional” transactions flow as smoothly as possible. Siimply contact us for more information.

WHO DO YOU KNOW NOW that is challenged with their mortgage payments OR needs to sell for less than their home is worth?? WE CAN HELP!!

WHO DO YOU KNOW that’s thinking of buying or selling a home?

Contact Doug Aegerter or Art Wagner for more information and a FREE Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) of your home or your neighborhood.

Fill out the form below to view the Market Report.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 19th, 2008 at 4:22 pm and is filed under St. Louis Market Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.