Seen in Seattle's Laurelhurst neighborhood.
Mike from Parsippany, NJ writes:
My wife and I started looking for our first house just after we got married (October 2008). At first we found plenty of homes that had been on the market for several months, and we saw prices on those homes drop over the next couple of months as they remained on the market without any interested buyers. We took our time shopping around, knowing that we had the advantage in this buyer's market and confident that we would find a great deal.
Then around February, something changed. The market seemed to wake up overnight, and all of a sudden some of those houses we thought would remain for sale indefinitely began to sell quickly. Throughout February and March we watched the shelf life of houses in the area become shorter and shorter. By mid-March we were finding that some houses were selling almost as quickly as they came on the market, and in many cases we never even had a chance to go see some of these houses ourselves.
In late March we found a great house, and put in an offer. The next day we learned that our offer was one of eight submitted on that house, and we were not the accepted high offer. Just last week we learned that the accepted offer was for $515,000, well above the list price of $449,000.
Throughout April it has been more of the same. We browse the MLS listings as they become available, and send emails to our realtor about the houses we would like to see. If I send the realtor a list of 7 houses, I can be almost certain that at least 2 of them will already be under contract before we get a chance to see them. We have found a few more houses that we were interested in enough to consider putting in an offer, only to find that we would again be going up against several other bidders, many of whom were placing bids above list price. In all cases, we were not prepared to offer more than the list price and had to walk away.
In a time when the economy is in crisis, the housing market is down, and everyone is looking for a sign that things might eventually take a turn for the better, I can honestly say that I see recovery in the northern New Jersey housing market already, to the extent that it hardly feels like a buyer's market anymore at all. Prices may be down still, but houses around here are selling quickly, often times for more than list price and in a matter of weeks or even days, not months. Of course by itself this can hardly be seen as a sign of any global shift in the economy, but I do wonder if other parts of the country are seeing this sort of activity and if collectively this might be an indication of some sort of change.
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