Murfreesboro Realtor Asks, Is the Market turning Around? In Middle Tennessee for Buyers and Sellers

April 29, 2010 - PRLog -- Is the Market turning Around?

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The Current market: We’re starting to see the market slowly recover and also see more action from buyers. But at the same time there are loads of short sales and foreclosures affecting us by holding prices down on traditional sales. There is still a lot of opportunity in this market for buyers and more than there has been for sellers as buyers return to the market.

The first-time home buyer tax credit and the market?
It’s somewhat hard to judge—it didn’t take off with a bang but there’s certainly interest and we do have people taking advantage of it. Our people are out there talking about it, though, and consumers want more information on the first-time and the move-up credit all the time. We offer lots of training on those topics.

What about this year?
The good news is, the transaction volume continues to pick up. We have more activity each month and we have had more activity for several months in a row. We’re watching it closely and we want to keep getting that transaction count up. I frequently tell the agents, “I’d rather have 10 sales at 100,000 than none at a million.”

Were keeping up to serve you better  
There are totally different topics that agents have to cover today, like explaining short sales and tax credits. We’re also offering home-buyer and -seller workshops where we invite our accountant to come in and talk about the complexities of these issues. Additionally, we have an arrangement in place with a third party to help us streamline short sales. Some of our agents are hesitant to work with short sales, but now that we have this third-party involvement to help streamline the process, they are more receptive.

Technology
Home buyers are getting their information online so online marketing is more important than ever before. We offer a website for each agent and we maintain it for them. We are trying to take some of the complexity out of technology for agents and support them as much as we can. We provide them with a contact management system to keep track of all their clients and systems to get leads out to agents immediately as they come in. We also promote their listings in a wide variety of online and print venues to ensure that they get as many leads as possible. That’s good promotion for both the agents and the sellers.

Why is offering home warranties important?
We have a great relationship with AHS. One of the things that has changed in the market is the number of short sales and bank-owned properties. Most buyers are wary because they’re not going to get the same amount of seller disclosure that they would on a traditional sale. AHS home warranties are a good way to relieve some of that anxiety for the buyer while at the same time protecting the seller. For the broker and the agent, it reduces the amount of liability associated with these sales.

When will the market will begin to turn around?
We are at the start of a slow and steady recovery—I think we’re further into that than we realize. From a transaction-count perspective, the low point was January of last year (2009), and we’ve seen increases over the last 12 months since then. I don’t expect prices to return to the levels of ’04, ’05 and ’06, but we have had a gradual march up in the number of transactions and as that continues we’ll start to see prices adjusting and increasing at a more traditional rate.

Please feel free to call or email me anytime.
Mike O'Donnell
615-473-5684
Tema@comcast.net
mbororealestate.com

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