Are you selling a vacant home?

Vacant homes may drive prices down even further.

As the number of homes available for sale goes up, it's no surprise that more homes are vacant - more than 30 percent during the third quarter of 2006 compared to a year earlier or 1.9 million homes, according to the U.S. Census Bureau shows. That's about half of all single-family
homes on the market, says Michael Carliner, vice president of economics for NAHB.

Sellers facing this dilemma are dropping prices in an attempt to encourage sales. ''If buyers are waiting longer, then an increasing number of homes become vacant, which means sellers
become desperate and prices fall further. That's where we are in the cycle,'' says Anirban Basu, an economist who is chairman and chief executive of Sage Policy Group Inc. in Baltimore.

Declining home prices could trigger more defaults on mortgage loans if homeowners
struggling with two mortgages cannot cover the cost of the loan by selling the house, adds Celia Chen, director of housing economics for Moody's Economy.com.

Locally in our Bradenton market, 22% of single family homes on the market are vacant and 28% of the condos for sale are vacant.