What's Happened: The Prince George's County Market is without a doubt slanting more and more heavily towards buyers. Sellers are finding it increasingly difficult to sell and inventory of available homes is steadily growing. March 2008 saw roughly 400 homes sold in P.G., and more than 7,000 homes on the market!
There was a very slight growth in the number of pending settlements and actual sales, and actual sales prices have continued to decline slightly. As a matter of references, sales prices have fallen back to the same average ($300,000) we saw exactly 3 years ago, in April of 2005. That's down 15% from the market's peak in October 2006
The average Days on Market (DOM) fell in March as well, from 130 days to 120 days (a drop of 8%), but it's still a far cry from the days when real estate was on the market for an average of less than 30 days!
What Does This Mean?
News like this is sort of "love it or hate it", depending on whether you're trying to buy or sell. It's really just further solidification of the fact that this is a "Buyers Market". Foreclosures are having a big impact on the market right now, and they make up a significant portion of sales right now, and unfortunately those properties are what traditional sellers are forced to compete with.
For sellers, it's a tough road, and in order to get through it and successfully sell your home, you need to do two things: Price aggressively and market heavily! There are 7,000 other homes on the market in P.G. alone, and that's your competition. You need to work very hard to stand out above the crowd and be seen.
For buyers, sitting on the fence has been slowly forcing down prices, and we're starting to see some good deals emerge, but it does not seem to be a full mainstream sense of value just yet. The biggest problem that I see is agents are not paying attention to what new construction homes are selling for when they're doing CMA's.
As a buyer, if you could buy a 2,800 s.f. resale home for $380,000, or buy a brand new 2,800 s.f. home for $395,000 with $15,000 in closing, which would you do? The pricing of new developments is very attractive right now, which makes buyers even more scarce for resale home sellers.
