A prospective client contacted me today to discuss the possibility of listing her lot in Wears Valley. The property has been listed with another firm for almost 6 months without success and she was shopping real estate firms to determine which one she might use for the listing when it expires soon. While we are very active in the Wears Valley market with several sales each year I warned her that if the price wasn’t reduced we would likely simply be the next real estate firm to fail to sell her property.

In researching the situation there are 325 lots currently listed for sale in Wears Valley by local members of our real estate board. This number is remarkable but truly daunting in light of the fact that there have only been 45 lot sales in the Wears Valley market within the last 12 months. In a slight glimmer of good news the six month period ended March 1st, 2008 did have 27 sales so the last six months was in fact better than the previous six. Even at the annualized pace of the latest six months our current inventory of lots in Wears Valley is equal to 6 years supply. For this potential seller to expect to earn a large profit on her lot purchased just a couple of years ago simply isn’t reasonable in our current market. I encouraged her not to re-list the property if she wasn’t going to reduce the price and that appears to be her decision. If I’m right and the real estate market is better in a year her chances of making a sale should be much better. Stay tuned, we should know a lot more about our market when the March sales numbers are firmed up – generally around two weeks after the end of the month. We’ll keep you posted…