St. Louis Real Estate-Market Watch December 20th, 2009

Real Estate-Market Watch by Art Wagner @ Keller Williams Realty Southwest Saint Louis , Sunset Hills, Mo.
December 20th, 2009
The Anatomy of St. Louis Real Estate

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The St. Louis Real Estate Market this week is preparing for Christmas with less active listings and less homes accepting contracts, dropping our pending ratio to just over 12 percent. Our homes sold in the last six months has tapered off a bit, but still remains over 200 more than last year at this time. Expired listings have increased a bit, as some homeowners will be staying off the market until after the holidays and after the first of the year.

Those homeowners staying off the market may wish they hadn’t, as there are still a good number of first time homebuyers in the market.

From our partners at Gorman and Gorman Home Loans comes this real estate news update:

Last week the Federal Reserve kept the Fed Funds Rate at the 0.0% to 0.25% range and reiterated that interest rates will remain low for an “extended period.” The Fed did say that economic activity picked up since the last meeting in November. The statement went on to say that deterioration in the labor markets is abating.

One very important note – the Fed took the time to reiterate that their Mortgage Backed Security purchase program will end on March 31, 2010 as previously stated. There had been some speculation that the program might continue beyond the March 31st date, but the inclusion of this reiteration in the Fed’s Policy Statement leads us to believe that the Fed is trying to make it clear that this program will terminate as scheduled. Source: CNN/Money

The inventory of completed but unsold new houses fell to 239,000 at the end of October, according to the National Association of Home Builders. That’s the fewest since May 1971, when the inventory stood at 236,000. The months’ supply — that is, the amount of time it would take to sell the current inventory at October’s sales rate — fell to 6.7 months, which the NAHB says is “respectable.” The historic high was set in January, when the supply topped out at 12.4 months. Meanwhile, the inventory of unsold existing houses fell in October to 3 million, and the month’s supply dipped to 6.8 months. The supply of resale houses hit its cyclical peak in June 2008, when it reached 11 months. Source: National Mortgage News

Note: Our Market Watch Report will not be published next weekend.

From all of us at The St. Louis Real Estate Voice to all of you;

Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 10:06 am and is filed under Real Estate News, 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.