Home Prices Up?

~ Laura

My SIL and brother are watching home prices for mid-60s colonials rise, while their starter home sits on the market without a bid. Zillow accesses our home at a ridiculous number that doesn’t take into account the out-dated kitchen and bathrooms, the aging roof, and the odd shaped property. In our current town, homes are snapped up in a few weeks. In our old town, just eight minutes away, prices continue to drop. The Times and other sources report that home prices are supposedly going up, but it’s very hard to make generalizations across markets.

I have very mixed feelings about the improvement in the real estate market, assuming those reports are completely accurate. As a home owner, yay! As an objective observer, I’m not sure that prices dropped enough, at least here in the Northeast.

Published by Laura

7 thoughts on “Home Prices Up?”

  1. Prices are still going up in my neighborhood, but not rapidly. Mine is maybe up 10% in ten years. The Victorian fixer-upers in sketchy but not murdery neighborhood for $50,000 are mostly gone, but that had to happen sooner or later.

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    1. Some realtor should definitely use that as her hot property’s tagline: “The Victorian fixer-upper in sketchy but not murdery neighborhood for $50,000!!”

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  2. Last year we had our house on the market for three months. A handful of showings and 10 weeks in we received a low offer that we accepted but the deal ended up falling apart. Eventually we decided to just take it off the market because keeping it show ready for more than three months was beyond my limit for cleanliness. This spring, nine months later, we put it back on the market and had more showings in the first week than we did the entire three months last year, got multiple offers, and made $30k more than the deal that didn’t happen last year.

    So, yeah, that’s just our story but it certainly felt a lot different this time around and I’m not sure that’s a good thing (in general, it was great for us). There was that same frenzied feeling to it as there was in in 2006 when we originally bought the place.

    We’re renting and I’m just not sure I want to get back into owning a home anytime soon. I hate the upkeep, I want to move out of this city sometime soon, and I really don’t want to buy again until I can envision being in the same place and house for a least a decade.

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      1. Renting and owning are about the same here. The place I’m renting is much more than the mortgage on the place I just sold but it’s also in a much nicer area so it’s hard to make a straight comparison.

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  3. Renting seems to cost less than owning around here, but the stock isn’t the same. I’m seeing a definitely uptick in the market around here, with inventory really low and people looking for houses that are selling at or above asking price. I think more folks who have been waiting out the market will put houses on the market, and it’ll be interesting to see how that goes.

    The large lot down the street was just subdivided into two, the house knocked down, and two houses have been going up pretty rapidly. Our house’s zillow price has gone up, but hasn’t reached the silly price it was at before the 2008 crash.

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  4. Just checked my own house on Zillow, which has gone up by about $50k since last time I checke 6 months ago. I also noticed several foreclosures in our neighborhood. One house I drive by every day and didn’t notice an issue until spring rolled around and the lawn wasn’t mowed. There was a meadow growing there. Its auction price is starting at a third of what houses around here cost. That can’t be good.

    So, yeah, mixed bag.

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