The tale of the Trojan Horse recounts the story of a huge wooden horse constructed by the Greeks in order to lull the Trojans into a false sense of security. Inside this wooden horse were hidden Greek warriors, and as the Greek army pretended to sail away from the city of Troy after a ten-year war, the supposedly victorious Trojans pulled the Horse into their city to celebrate their victory. But that night, the soldiers inside the Horse crept out of hiding, opened the gates to the city of Troy allowing the Greek army to enter and destroy the city. Guess what. The Trojan Horse is back, only this time it comes disguised as the real estate short sale.

Short Sales are the trojan horse threatening the destruction of the housing market. I never thought that I would come to that conclusion but a look at the statistics are both shocking and revealing regarding short sales and what they’ve done to the housing market here in my home town of Grants Pass. Our local market area has currently a total of 1240 properties that were listed in the month of June, 2010. During that 30 day period we sold 84 properties, we had another 84 go pending, and 34 more became contingent sales. That’s not bad but by no means good. The amazing part is that short sales represented 10% of the total inventory for sale and yet out of over 100 properties that were listed as short sales, there were only 4 that actually sold. That’s a mere 3/10 of 1% of the total activity in the market. Sadly, short sales are influencing the price of all the other properties in the market, contaminating everything around them because short sellers have no stake in the outcome of the sale.

Let me explain. Continue reading Short Sales and the Trojan Horse

There is good news and bad news for the southern Oregon housing market. First, the good news: Sales volume and prices are up slightly to moderately and days-on-market and number-of-homes for sale are down. All this bodes well for a continuing recovery. Business was fairly brisk for home sales in Grants Pass and the Southern Oregon real estate market in general, and the months of March and April were very good as buyers scrambled to take advantage of the expiration of the home buyers tax credit that ended on April 30th. We had until June 30th to close those contracts and the last week of June we were very busy with closings. The house and senate both passed an extension of time to complete closings for those sales that were hung up and couldn’t meet the June 30th deadline. President Obama is expected to sign it. That’s good because I had a number of sales that were supposed to meet that deadline and couldn’t.

Speaking of short sales, Continue reading Southern Oregon Real Estate Market Update