Thanks in part to a late-year tax-credit boost, Clark County homes sales last year topped sales in 2008.
Buyers also were encouraged by falling prices and historically low mortgage loan rates, which pushed sales of new and preowned homes to 5,479 houses in 2009, a 6.7 percent increase over 2008, according to a Tuesday report from Riley & Marks Inc. in Vancouver.
While entry-level homes below $200,000 were the best sellers, the recovery has started to spread to a broader spectrum of the market, say local Realtors.
“Homes in the $300,000 to $400,000 range moved really well in December,” said Sharry McNeel, an associate of Coldwell Banker Barbara Sue Seal Properties in Vancouver.
She said a groundswell of move-up buyers entered the market in November, just after Congress issued a $6,500 tax credit to buyers who have owned their home for five years or longer.
“That’s spurring them on, but I think people are also feeling more confident. They feel now’s the time to move before prices go up,” McNeel said.
December’s median home price — half sold for more, half for less — was $215,000 for the 477 homes sold in the county, up from November’s median of $199,950, but down 8.3 percent from the same month last year, when 321 houses sold.
“We’re digging out. That’s what’s happening,” said Mike Lamb, an associate broker with the Vancouver office of Windermere Real Estate/Stellar Group. “When you start to improve, it creates some additional activity.”
He said that home sales here started picking up in June, the first time in more than two years that monthly sales surpassed those of the year before. At the time, starter-home buyers were scrambling to get in before an $8,000 tax credit expired for first-time buyers.
In November, Congress extended the first-time buyers’ credit deadline to June and created a separate $6,500 credit for move-up buyers.
Last year people shopping for houses also saw some of the lowest prices in nearly five years, as owners lost property to foreclosure, and those houses were then sold for rock-bottom prices.
Asking prices have recently inched up, along with prices on short sales, in which the borrower sells for less than is owed on the mortgage, said Vancouver Realtor Scott Anthony.
“Investors see this as the bottom. Now, they’re starting to get in and buy these up,” said Anthony, who specializes in marketing bank-owned properties for Windermere Real Estate Stellar Group.
However, Clark County continued to hold the state’s fifth-highest rate of foreclosure statewide in November.
It could take two years for those foreclosed properties to work through the market, Anthony said.
In the meantime, Realtors expect the increased home-selling activity to continue, at least through April 30. It’s the deadline for buyers to submit a written offer in order to receive the home-buyer’s tax credit.
“I think people are really feeling the crunch of the first-time buyer money,” said Linda McClellan, an agent with Prudential NW Properties in Vancouver, and president of the 1,495-member Clark County Association of Realtors. “If they’re going to get on the band wagon, they’ve got to get going.”
Others say they are warning clients that it’s also the best time to take advantage of low mortgage loan interest rates, hovering near 5 percent.
“It’s all creating a sense that now is the best opportunity,” Lamb said.
McNeel said the only complaint she’s heard from buyers is that there is a low inventory of new homes on the market in Clark County. In 2009, home-building activity continued to fall, finishing the year with a 24.8 percent decline in new-home starts. The total value of new-home construction dropped to below $100 million for the first time since 1986, according to the Clark County Department of Community Development.
“I have clients who want new, and there isn’t much out there to choose from,” McNeel said.
