Hot Markets Cooling Off, Others Getting Hotter

From the Wall Street Journal:

As home sales cool on the East and West coasts, some cities that missed out on the real-estate boom are becoming the strongest markets.

A look at inventories of unsold homes, prices and employment trends points to generally positive signs in Houston, Dallas and Atlanta -- cities that have seen only modest home-price gains in recent years.

Metropolitan areas whose housing markets look less healthy, at least in the short term, include Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and San Francisco. All of them have growing inventories of homes and relatively weak job growth. As a result, houses that a year or two ago might have sold in hours now are languishing on the market for months, and some sellers are cutting prices....

In Miami, a building boom has more than tripled the inventory in the past year. Even so, population growth should absorb any excess supply within 12 to 18 months, says Ronald A. Shuffield, president of Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell Realtors, a big real-estate brokerage firm there.=========

Here in Manatee County Florida we have a 548 percent increase in inventory while sales are down 46 percent. Today's median sale price is down 11 percent from the high of 2005.

If you are thinking about selling, please give us a call. We know the market!