Perrysburg Blog

A empty shell.

Crabs like them.

But they are terrible for helping homeowners to pay their mortgage.

And if you drive along Alt20 – aka Illinois Ave. in Maumee, you will see a lot of empty shells.

And “FOR LEASE” signs.

And vacant factories, offices, and businesses.

It’s a vivid reminder of what has happened and what has helped residential real estate to collapse in value.

The collateral damage from this one street’s empty and shuttered businesses and factories is felt in every subdivision in Perrysburg.  I know clients that have lost jobs in Crandenbrook and other Perrysburg neighborhoods who used to work on this street.

But now their jobs are gone.

You want reports of the economy getting better?  You want to know when the residential market is better?  You better go for a drive . . .

ALWAYS asked at every listing appointment.

The answer is . . . “it depends”.

On your price.  Your motivation.  Your vacuuming.  Your pets.   Your kids.  Your collection of stuff.

Overall, in Perrysburg, the average DOM or “days on the market” is right about 90 as of last month.

However it changes month vs. month and week to week.

Why?  Houses are coming on the market.   They are going pending.  They are coming BACK on the market.  And with a 300 to 500 house sample population it does not take much to whipsaw the numbers for one month.

So the TREND is what I look at.

With REO sales red hot right now (so says this report from California and my own Perrysburg REO’s are pretty much all sold or under contract). . . is that activity helping move other, non REO houses?

Inquiring minds want to know:

You can too – on this chart.

And the trend is that houses are selling FASTER (fewer average days on the market) and there is less “wait” (which we call MSI or “months supply of inventory”)   The Perrysburg MSI is now 1/2 of what it was a year or two ago – down from 21 months to a more manageable 7.1 months supply of inventory.

Price still rules.

So get your house priced right, cleaned up, and then the numbers will play out good for you.

I get asked this question all the time – at least seemingly to me!

By my agents.   By my clients.  By my corporate clients.  My buyers.   By vendors and suppliers that work with or for me.

Everyone wants to know.

I repeat:  The downward price trend in Perrysburg real estate will not change, in my opinion, until people are making more money and taking it home.

The State of Ohio and the Federal Government can goose demand for a quarter or a year, they can push loans onto people who should not buy, they can do all sorts of tax credits . . . but the market will always trump the politician.

Always.

Look at this chart.

It is breathtaking in its simplicity.

We can talk all we want about jobs.  (Or “JOBS, JOBS, JOBS, JOBS” as our leaders put it)

We can call unemployed people “no longer seeking employment”.  We can tell part time employees that they are fully employed even as they march into Perrysburg Christians United for food to feed their families.   We can call part time seasonal workers fully hired back.

Not going to change the real estate market price trend in Perrysburg.

That chart above – it simply shows tax witholdings from working people and companies.

Zero Hedge Blog interprets it thus:

Even as the BLS and the administration are trying to cover up the real state of unemployment affairs using assorted semantic gimmicks of just what it means to be unemployed, and as companies provide adjusted EPS numbers, while actual earnings continue to collapse, the true barometer of spending, provided by the Financial Management Service, tax withholdings (net of refunds), continues to paint the truest picture of just what is really happening with both America’s consumer and the corporate world. And it ain’t pretty. On a rolling 12 month basis, individual tax withheld has dropped by nearly 8% YoY, from $1.42 trillion to $1.31 trillion, while company witholdings are down a whalloping 64%, from $274 billion to just under $100 billion! This is money that will never be used to pay down the skyrocketing US deficit, because both the US consumer and average US company are simply not collecting the required cash to line the Treasury’s pockets with the one traditional way to pad the deficit: taxes. Expect much, much, much more debt issuance in America’s short, medium and long-term future.

Wage payers- people with great full time jobs in Perrysburg are the ONLY way to get demand and prices improved.

Period.

Not wages paid to pizza delivery drivers or census takers or package wrappers for 30 days.

Wages paid to machinists and car assembly line workers and engineers and chemists.

Then Perrysburg will get better and your home will be worth more than it is today.

More words than I am going to write.

“When is the market turning around?”

“Is it getting better in Perrysburg?”

Many questions . . . . and I continually believe that until the job market changes, nothing will change for the better in Perrysburg real estate.

The data from all the various states has been combined into an info-packed graph:

When companies are expanding, hiring, and adding employees that is when real estate will turn around.

Not until then.

Down 40% . . .

Thanks for asking!

But I am having a great month . . .

Ouch.

Good homes?  They are still slowing.

Overpriced, underwhelming homes?  You can only imagine!

-44% drop in NUMBER of closed sales means that you need an agent who knows the market, knows how to market, and knows how to sell your home to a buyer, a bank, and an inspector.

All data for 2009 YTD thru April . . . .

Median price, sold listings:  $163,000

Number of homes sold, month of April:  21

Number of homes sold, April 2007:  43

Listings for sale, Perrysburg (Area 53), 410

Average Days on the Market for Actives:  139

Properties Sale Pending, April 30: 44

My comments:  The number of homes sold is down 51% in a 2 year period.  Back in 2007 the average Perrysburg listing sold for $206,000.   This year?  An amazing low median price of $163,000.

That represents a 43,000 decline in value for the average house.

Which means if you did not sell your house, your value went down by 21%.

Amazing numbers.

The trend has been bad for 2 years for Perrysburg.

Only sell if you NEED to sell.

If you NEED to sell, you need to ask the current market price.

You know, stats / statistics are dangerous things.

Easily manipulated.

Slice the data in the time frame/price range/criteria you want . . . and you can make it say “BLUE”.  Do it in the way I want and I can make the same data say “RED”.

Very dangerous.  Deceptive.  At least that’s what my statistics teacher at Duke told us before he taught!

N.A.R.  (the National Association of REALTORS) comes out with some stats.   Sales are UP in the past month!!!  Yeah!!!

But comparing one month against another . . .

When you know that the current months’ “bump” is solely due to depressed REO assets selling . . .

When many local markets are cratering . . .

Highly dubious.  Almost deceptive.  Even though technically true.

But what of the big, national statistical picture?   Can we look at ALL the numbers?  What will that tell us????

Here is the picture:

National numbers are both up 4.7% but they are also down by 41.1% over the past year.

There is no honest way to say that sales are up.

The days of a million or 1.2 million homes selling per year in the USA?  Gone.  For a long time.

Pricing and your homes’ pricing strategy are all important in this market.

In Perrysburg and everywhere else apparently.

• 1.8% of all U.S. homes are in foreclosure
• Therefore, 98.2% are NOT in foreclosure
• 33% of all owner-occupied homes don’t even have a mortgage!
• 18% of all U.S. mortgages are upside with 2/3 of them located in 7 states (Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, Ohio, Michigan, Georgia)
• 2.8% of all U.S. mortgages are three or more months in arrears.
• There are 18.6 million vacant homes in the U.S. now.
• 25 MLS closed sales, single family, in Perrysburg, February 2009
• 305 MLS closed sales, single family, in Lucas and Wood Counties, February 2009
• Average Toledo Board of Realtors agent sold just .25 of a home in February 2009
• Jon Modene closed 11 transactions in February, 2009.
• Perrysburg number of listings for sale on MLS, end of February, 2009 = 305
• Perrysburg number of listings that went “pending” in February, 2009 = 30
• Perrysburg median SOLD price, February 2009 = $172,000
• Total number of houses for sale in Lucas and Wood Counties in February 2009 = 4838
• Total number of houses that went pending in Lucas and Wood Counties in February 2009 = 363
• 11.1 Months supply of inventory in Wood and Lucas Counties

When Will The Market Thaw??

I am asked by about every client or customer: “When is it going to turn around (in real estate)?”

I don’t know the answer.

I used to say “If I did have the answer to that question I would be working on Wall Street” – but that’s not a good place to work anymore!

Here’s what I think:  when the number of new bank owned properties starts to dry up, then the market will change course.

But you must know this – Fannie, Chase, Freddie, Bank of America, et al have all had a moratorium on new foreclosures and evictions for the past 60 days – and that “REO HOLD” has NOT slowed the pace of new REO properties coming on the market.

If you are focused like a laser beam on Perrysburg, which I am trained to be when I have to (which is when I am listing and selling and consulting on Perrysburg real estate and for Perrysburg real estate clients, although this was a typical day in that I had to list a house in Toledo, list a house in Rossford, secure/list a house in Holland for a bank, and then list a house in Perrysburg all while my team was showing houses in and around Maumee, Perrysburg, and Toledo . . . but I digress)

IF you are focused on Perrysburg the number that arrests your attention today is -9%.

Because the Toledo Blade ran a story yesterday (www.ToledoBlade.com) about housing values in Toledo being off by 5.2%.

I was quoted in the story by John Chavez, the Blade’s excellent Business reporter.

But, you know, when you are quoted, you can never really get the whole story out.   John was working with the national numbers that the National Association of Realtors was using in a press release for all of Ohio.

But there is no “Ohio” real estate market.

If I had my own place to write – Oh, I do, right here! – I would say that ALL real estate is local.   All of the big national statistics have to be brought right down to the local level.

You want the truth about the Perrysburg market?  Then you had better use the right metrics and numbers and data to get it.

And the numbers have indeed flattened out – but if you look back to just one year ago, which is a time frame that most of us are very comfortable using, the median price in Perrysburg of sold homes is down by -9%.

$197,500 in July of 2007 to $179,750 in July of 2008.

That’s a BIG drop.

Are we done?  I don’t think we are going to see another $17,750 drop in Perrysburg over the next 12 months.

I do not see it.

Not in Perrysburg.

You can track what is happening with homes on the market anytime you want by looking at www.OnlyPerrysburg.com (shameless plug – it’s one of my websites, a pretty neat one I think – one button gets you every house for sale in Perrysburg!).

What will our market look like in July 2009 if it drops another 9 or 10%?

You and I most likely don’t want to know . . .