St. Louis Real Estate-Market Watch December 2009

Real Estate-Market Watch by Art Wagner @ Keller Williams Realty Southwest Saint Louis , Sunset Hills, Mo.
December 6th, 2009
The Anatomy of St. Louis Real Estate

The St. Louis Real Estate market this week continues with our Holiday slow-down in both seller and buyer activity.

For a brief look back this year, we took a look at the change in list prices and sales prices for the past six months compared with the some six month time frame last year. We found that average list prices fluctuated between 1 percent and 3 percent and sales prices fluctuated between 0 percent and 1.7 percent. The big differences in all price ranges continues to be the number of days that a home stays on the market before it is sold. Compared to the last six months of last year, days on market fluctuated between 13.6 percent up to 51.3 percent.

Take a look for yourself; you can download and print this comparison HERE

Ben Bernanke speaks today, Monday, Dec. 7th which will give us a good idea as to what home loan rates will be doing in the near future. He will be speaking at the Economic Club in Washington today. This will be the first time we will hear from him since the better-than-expected jobs report came out last Friday.

The FED also meets next week for the final time this year to implement policy for the nation’s financial system. There has been some talk of the FED raising the interest rates a bit sooner than previously thought. That may have to change according to James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, as he beleives the Fed needs to pay attention to future asset bubbles.

Another concern is, What will happen to home loans if the Federal Reserve stops buying mortgage-backed securities next March? If and when the program ends, rates will rise, but most financial observers say it is very likely they won’t skyrocket. Keith Gumbinger, a vice president at financial publishers, HSH Associates, predicts that the end of Fed intervention will push rates up about three-quarters of a point for a 30-year conforming loan-somewhere in the mid-5 percent range. By late 2010, Gumbinger says the rate will be closer to 6 percent. Michael Larson, a real estate analyst at Weiss Research, is dubious that the Fed will actually end the program. He contends that the Fed will continue buying securities as long as the housing recovery is tenuous. And as long as the Fed continues to donimate that market, “we’re not really going to move the needle on rates,” Larson says. Source: Smart Money.
Information for this article has been contributed by our friends at Gorman and Gorman Home Loans. Thanks, Guys!!

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 3:01 pm and is filed under St. Louis Market Reports, Uncategorized. 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.