The Ocala real estate market report provides monthly sales statistics and commentary for buyers and sellers.
Note, sales for this period are from offers made 30 to 45 days earlier. This means that the holidays impacted sales and this accounts for the low total. Additionally there was a foreclosure moratorium during that time also.
Active listing continue to go down as over priced sellers just give up. As I always say we will remain in a buyers market until active listings drop below 3,000 homes.
According to the Ocala area MLS we sold 141 homes in January 2009. This number is low because most contracts take 30 to 45 days to close. That means all the closing in January came from offers written during the holidays from Thanksgiving to the end of December.
Of the 142 homes sold 59 were $100,000.00 and below. There are some very affordable houses in Ocala right now. Between $100K and $200K there were 61 sales, still very affordable.
If you are a seller you can see that most sales were below $200,000.00. Buyers are out there but they are mostly in the lower price ranges.
Foreclosures are still hot. During January they accounted for almost 30% of all sales.There were also 10 Short Sales. This is a fairly large number of Short sales that got to closing. I don’t know if banks are being more cooperative or if this was just an unusual month.
Inventory levels are about the same at around 6,500. This still gives us over 30 months of inventory and a severe buyers market.