January Home Sales In Memphis

Overall January 2009 home sales in the Memphis area declined by 38.8 percent as compared to home sales occurring in January 2008. Foreclosure sales plunged 41 percent. One of the reasons for this was the amnesty placed on homes going into foreclosure in December 2008. Those homes were given a grace period and may not make it to foreclosure if the President's new plan were to go into effect and actually work. Many of those homes had already been vacated and we will see if the former owner would actually move back in and take up new payments. That will be a good question, since they were not able to make payments before, then if their payments went down a couple of hundred dollars, would they move back in to the home and put it back in good condition. If you have been in any of these homes, you will know that for the most part, they are in poor to bad condition and some in horrid condition. The end results will remain to be seen regarding these foreclosures.
The average sales price for existing homes in January declined by another 11 percent compared to last January while Memphis new home sales prices showed an increase of 18 percent. Again, this increase can be deceiving, as many "new" homes that were sold had already had their prices lowered and more new homes may have been sold due to these severely lowered prices, but then when comparing these two January's, 2008 to 2009, the percent of homes price increase could be an anomaly created by the market itself. The numbers are way to skewed to come to many conclusions other than we are still in the thick of a sellers market and a major market downturn. Hopefully, inventories will decrease and rates will continue to go down and maybe the available buyers will come out and start to purchase soon.