Sep

21

Long Island Real Estate Market: Moving Forward

Filed Under Buyers, Sellers, Sellers & Buyers |

In my previous article, Long Island Real Estate Market: It’s Starting To Look Ugly, I struggled with that title for the simple reason, it just sounds aweful. So I wanted to make the next article a bit more positive in tone.

The content of the previous article is filled with facts about declining prices. I wrote it not to discourage homeowners, but to warn them of what lies ahead. While we have a long way to go before prices settle and the Long Island real estate market begins an upward tend, there are many national statistics indicating an end to the market decline.

Now these statistics are positive. However (I’m beginning not to like this word very much), these improvements in the marketplace are lagging behind the negative impacts on our financial markets and housing supply vs. demand ratios.

My hesitancy to jump for joy in my articles is simply because I do not want to give the wrong impression to homeowners wanting to sell. It’s imperative that homes are priced aggressively. One of the mistakes people make in listening to the news is they hear terms like, “improvements in sales” and translate that to, “improvements in sale prices”. And that is not the case. We may have sold more homes throughout the Long Island real estate market within the last month or so, but that does not mean, prices improved. It means several other things like, prices dropped to a point where buyers paid the respective price(s), mortgage rates dropped, gasoline prices dropped, and real estate agents marketed their properties harder than ever before.

This paragraph above is key for homeowners to understand. So please, read it again so that you build an understanding of the business of real estate and how the market works.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with some positive quotes from some pretty respectable names in the news. Hopefully they will help us in our attempts to continue moving forward.