Fearing further discounts, the neighbors on her cul-de-sac are now upset at her for selling. “It’s tough now,” Roberts said. “But housing prices could go down even further.
“There’s no good time to sell right now, unfortunately.”
After years of assuming the housing market couldn’t get any worse, a growing number of Triangle homeowners and agents are now resigned to the fact that no one seems to know when it will hit bottom.
Last week, a key national housing indicator, the Standard Poor’s/Case-Shiller index, showed that housing prices are now at the lowest level in nearly a decade. Such news has only heightened anxiety among homeowners everywhere about where the market is headed.
The Triangle isn’t among the 20 areas included in the index, and it’s generally considered to be one of the healthier markets in the country. But even here, the average price of a single-family home has dropped from $243,900 during the first quarter of 2008 to $229,000 during the same period this year, Triangle Multiple Listing Services data show. So far this year, total home sales in this region are near a decade low.
“It’s a great time to buy, but it’s a horrible time to sell,” said Graham Smith, 39, who was touring homes Sunday in North Raleigh. “You’re afraid of losing your shirt on your home.”
Smith, along with his wife and two daughters, was looking at homes for his sister, who is relocating to Raleigh from Pennsylvania.
The Smiths, who own a home in North Raleigh, eventually want to move to a house with a larger yard. But they’ve watched nervously as the house next door has sat on the market since January drawing little interest.
“We’ll ride it out for a while,” he said. “We’re scared.”
Among the homes the Smiths toured Sunday was one in the Lantern Square subdivision owned by Julia Truelove.
Truelove, 43, has owned the house for 13 years. She wants to move to a larger home and figures the current market conditions are ideal to make such an upgrade.
“At my price point, even if I wasn’t going to get what I got a few years ago, that would still help me get a larger house that I couldn’t have afforded a few years ago,” she said.
Truelove spent about $4,000 making improvements to the house before she put it on the market. That money won’t show up in the list price for the house, but the improvements will help separate it from other houses on the market.
It’s now listed for $214,500 – $5,000 less than when it first came on the market 60 days ago.
Truelove won’t buy another home until she sells her current one, a situation that many buyers now find themselves in.
Now that their four children are out of the house, Bill and Karen King of Cary want to downsize to a townhouse that will require less maintenance.
They held an open house Saturday for the house in Lochmere that they’ve owned for 16 years. One person dropped by.
“Roy from Boston,” Bill King, 58, said. “For him, it was also the first one of the day. I don’t think he’d ever seen a house in Cary before.”
Since listing the house May 2, the Kings have cut the price from $440,000 to $429,000. The couple have a price below which they won’t go, but they’re also realists, Bill King said.
Hugh and Laurie Guy are among those homeowners who have seen both sides of today’s market.
At the end of the month, the Guys are expected to close the sale of their house in Fuquay-Varina and the purchase a new home in Cary’s Lochmere neighborhood.
The Guys will lose money on theFuquay-Varina house, which they bought 15 months ago. But they’re also getting the Cary house, which is 600 square feet larger, for a discount. “It’s such a buyer’s market,” Hugh Guy said.