Real estate information firm First American CoreLogic has good news and bad news for Baltimore-area residents trying to sell a home that's not a short sale or foreclosure.
The good news for sellers: Average sale prices are rising -- up 8 percent in January vs. two years earlier and up 13 percent vs. January 2009.
The bad news: You're not riding the wave of increased home sales.
Seventeen percent fewer traditional resales sold in January than a year earlier in the Baltimore metro area, says First American CoreLogic. Compared with two years ago, the drop in sales is about 50 percent.
But short sales, where owners need lender approval because they're underwater on their mortgage, are on the rise. These deals increased 18 percent year-over-year and have more than doubled in two years.
Bank-owned properties -- foreclosures -- bumped up a modest 1 percent year-over-year, but there were 75 percent more of these sales in January than two years earlier.
All told, distress sales made up a quarter of January home sales in the Baltimore metro area, First American CoreLogic says.
(Like traditional resales, sales of new homes were also down -- but not as much in recent months. The year-over-year drop was 6 percent.)
What about the average sale price for distress deals, you ask?
For foreclosures, it's down 12 percent year-over-year (and down 20 percent over the past two years). But short sale average prices are actually rising -- up 11 percent year-over-year.
Here's the average sale price by type in January:
New homes: $392,000
Traditional resales: $278,000
Short sales: $267,000
Foreclosures: $154,00
So foreclosures -- on average -- are by far the cheapest, though they probably also require the most work. It's interesting that short sales aren't far off the average price of traditional resales. Wish we could know if the types of homes that sold in each category average out similarly in terms of size and style.
Buyers: How much of a deal do you think local foreclosures and short sales offer these days? Does it work out to significantly less money even accounting for any fix-up work needed?