Having a new year has some great benefits. The best one might be that you can leave last year’s baggage behind and start off with a clean slate. A lot of people would probably like to do that with last year. It’s going to be interesting to see how 2010 unfolds. Each one seems to have a distinct personality. It feels like there is even more of a change because it’s a new decade as well. No more single digits finally. I’m feeling very positive about the possibilities that 2010 has in store for all of us.
The holidays have come and gone and for just about everyone, the work week, month and year is off and running beginning tomorrow…me included. Since my focus is on residential real estate I wanted to see where the market is at the start of 2010. I took a look at the statistics from our local real estate board MIBOR using my Realtor search tools. As of this date a search of all residential properties says that there are 13,554 active residential listings for sale right now in the nine county greater metropolitan Indianapolis area. The average listed price of these properties is $208, 189. To me that average list price number sounded kind of high vs. what I thought the average sale price has been running. So I searched for year 2009 and it says that the average sale price actually was $120,811 last year for this same area. Average sale price is always lower than average list price…but that’s a huge difference from the average listed price of properties for sale now. I have a feeling the average sale price will rise this year with the sale prices of some more expensive homes being figured into the average…and fewer inexpensive homes selling than in 2009. Last year, there were an unusual amount of financially distressed properties sold that brought the average sale price down. Just about everyone I’ve talked to says that the economy feels much stronger to them than it did a year ago at this time. Some real estate professionals are predicting that median priced home sales will be better than last year, and upper price range home sales, which were especially slow, should heat up. So it will be interesting to see how things play out. Looking forward to it.
Today’s post is not so much about Indianapolis or the real estate market. But in a way it is, as all sectors of the economy are tied together, and ultimately we are all in this thing together. I stopped by the Auto Show in the Convention Center a couple days ago. I hadn’t been to one in a few years and thought it might be fun to see all the changes. It didn’t take long to see that there really weren’t a whole lot of substantial changes from a few years ago. Yeah there was more technology and creature comforts and some design changes, but I was hoping that there would be more of an emphasis on fuel consumption. After reading the estimated MPG on the car stickers, I was dismayed at the number of models still offering only 12 to 18 MPG. Forget highway mileage which is a little better. Not many of us do the majority of our driving on the highway. But 12 to 18?… Come on now. I’m not sure why US auto makers especially are betting their very existence on the chances of people still buying something like that these days. Gasoline is surely going to go up in price. There were some hybrids that got 30 MPG or more…even up to 51 for the Prius which was the highest rated car I saw. The hybrid Camry for instance got 33 MPG, which saved about $250/year of fuel cost over the gasoline model Camry. But the sticker price of the hybrid was thousands more, and even if you kept it 12 years, you’d never save enough on fuel to make up for the cost difference of the purchase price. People would like to be greener if they could, but the dollars have to make sense before they will buy the cars. With all the talk about new technologies, I was also hoping to see some all-electric or fuel cell cars, but there were none. It just felt like nothing much has changed.
