December 3, 2007

Interest Rates have dropped slightly to 5.625% on December 3, 2007. Rates have again fallen in anticipation of the Fed cutting interest rates at their next meeting in December.

Current listing inventory - 215 active listings in Owatonna as of today, that number has dropped a little bit lower since last week. We are getting closer to our goal of seeing the listing count drop below 200 before the end of the year. Average days on the market has remained fairly stable at 166 days (that's 5.6 months gang). The number of pending listings remained stable at 21 houses. This number has not rebounded well after all of the closings last week and is beginning to concern us. Average days on the market for pendings is down again to 111 days. There is now a 55 day difference between the Active and Pending listings. That shows us there are still too many sellers out there that are being unrealistic in their asking price. There have been 378 properties Closed since 01-01-07, with an average days on market time of 114 days.

Check out Our Blog from one year ago. Interest rates were 5.625% and we had 212 Active listings in Owatonna. It is interesting to see that one year ago we had almost the exact same listing count & the same interest rates. We are down on Closed listings by 8.5% vs 2006. So in spite of all of the negative media attention, real estate in Owatonna in still selling well. It is however taking 22% longer to sell those houses than it did in 2006.

Home buyers, now is a golden time to be purchasing a home. Interest rates are low & many home prices have been reduced.

Some other interesting statistics about the homes currently active in the market. 14.4% of the homes are new construction (they don't count in the days-on-market count because of a quirk in our MLS System), 8.25% of the homes have been through foreclosure and 56.3% of the homes have had price reductions.