To date, sellers have been reluctant participants in the real estate market since home prices began to fall more than five years ago.
The result has been frustration for buyers, who have been eager to score deals but upset when confronted with the choices available. It is a market that for years now has been dominated by a lackluster choice of older homes in need of significant repair.
So will we see more homes – and more importantly better homes – hit the market this spring?
Certainly the economy is finally showing signs of life – that might encourage a few would-be mover-uppers to take a chance.
Yet prices have still not completely settled – the median price for a single-family home has fallen to $265,000, a drop of 5 percent since January 2011.
So what about foreclosures? As banks start lowering the boom again on homeowners in wake of the big $26 billion foreclosure fraud settlement, won’t we see a flood of bank owned homes hit the market?
Maybe in Florida and Nevada, but in this case, Massachusetts, and Greater Boston in particular, are truly different.
Bank-owned homes accounted for just 3.5 percent of all sales in the state in 2011, The Warren Group reports. OK, so that low number may reflect the fallout from robo-signing scandal, which prompted banks to pull back significantly on foreclosures.
But 2010’s number, before the robo-signing scandal had fully hit, was still not a market mover – foreclosures accounted for just 6.5 percent of all sales that year.
The fact is, there are simply not enough foreclosed homes out there to solve our inventory problems.
We need more sellers to take a chance on the market. And it’s anyone’s guess whether we will see that happen this spring.