News Flash: Housing Sales Dropped in July

by Casey on August 24, 2010

The last 12 hours have provided news stories that are dismal and dismal-er in regard to national home sales last month. So as not to  make the rest of the country feel bad about its poor numbers, Greensboro is right there with everyone else.

Sheesh.

A decline in sales was expected. The Federal Tax Rebate for home buyers has about expired (there’s an extension to close on contacts that were in place by April 30th) but for the most part, people who hurried up to find a house by the end of April also hurried to close by the original cut-off date of June 30th.

That left poor old July out in the cold. Or the extreme heat, as it turned out. Most hellish temperatures EVER. Too hot too think. Too hot to trot. And perhaps too hot to buy houses.

All in all, it’s been a fairly wretched time for anyone other than sno-cone vendors.

To be specific, there were 188 closed properties in the nine Greensboro residential zip codes in July*, compared to 244 in July 2009 and 348 in in June and . That’s a decline of 23% and a gut-flipping drop of 45%, respectively.

(I’ll see your ‘Sheesh‘ and raise you a ‘Yowzer‘).

Sale prices are a different story. The average closed price in July was $167,565. That’s only about 2% down from both July of 2009 ($171.484) and June 2010 ($172,051). What this says to me is that prices really have about bottomed out. Sellers have been squeezed as much as there is to squeeze. They’re all squozed out.

Another rather startling stat is that 28% of the closed properties in Greensboro were foreclosures. Not the highest percentage ever, but certainly the highest in last several months.

Alright, enough palaver. Here are the rest of the numbers (and purty charts):

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If you have questions, comments or a good joke to share shoot me an email. I’m a full time Realtor®, I love what I do and would be thrilled to hear from you.

* All data from Triad Multiple Listing Service (MLS) as of August 24, 2010, and is only as good as the information entered, which is done by humans, who make errors. The information is only for those residential zip codes for Greensboro and does not include the surrounding communities.

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