The MacDonalds' Glen Burnie house sold four days after they listed it with an agent. And the Baltimore home the couple moved into? They had to outbid another buyer for it.
Not in the bubble days. This year.
Falling prices and the $8,000 tax credit for new homeowners are tempting buyers back into the fray, in what could be the early signs of a turnaround for a housing market that's been declining since late 2005. In a third of the metro area's city neighborhoods and suburban communities, more homes changed hands in the first half of the year than during the same months last year, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis. Compare that with a year ago, when buyers were pulling back from all but a handful of ZIP codes.
Sales increases came in expensive places - such as Howard County's Fulton and Baltimore's Inner Harbor - as well as more moderately priced communities, such as Edgewood in Harford County.
This isn't happy-days-are-here-again for would-be sellers, however, many of whom are stuck with homes worth less than their mortgages. Average sale prices dropped in eight out of 10 city neighborhoods and suburban ZIP codes, according to the same Sun analysis, which looked at home sales reported to Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. One out of six communities posted price drops of at least 30 percent on average.
But homeowners who can afford to set lower asking prices are getting offers.
"Now there's definitely hope out there," said Pat Hiban of the Pat Hiban Real Estate Group at Keller Williams Crossroads in Ellicott City. "Sellers are seeing their neighbors actually selling."
The new housing-market reality, agents say, is buyers competing over bargains while high-priced homes languish. Real estate investors, faced with limited financing options, doing all-cash deals. And lots of homeowners who want to move but can't unless they - or their lenders - take a loss. A quarter of all Baltimore-area homes with a mortgage are worth less than that mortgage, according to estimates by real estate information company First American CoreLogic.
Jason and Christi Stevenson's home is in that "under water" group. When they got word that the Navy was going to relocate Jason Stevenson to Hawaii, they put their home near Baltimore's Patterson Park on the market for $325,000. That was a year and a half ago. They're just selling now - for $246,000, which is $49,000 less than what they bought it for in the spring of 2006. At one point they tried to rent it out, but "rent has gotten so competitive because a lot of people were in the same boat that we were in," said Jason Stevenson, 33.
