Selling your property today requires a realistic view of the marketplace you are dealing in.  In my annual "State of Real Estate" addresses, we give a historical perspective of where we are and how we got here. We have just updated the market activity and trending thru 2007.  While this is a profile of Guilford properties only, the same is pretty much true throughout the Shoreline area. As the saying goes, "figures can lie and liars can figure" please know that these numbers were gotten directly from the Middshore MLS and show no slant to any one particular company.

Also please know the market is fluid so these numbers are subject to change daily. However, small changes in these numbers will not change the overall tenor of the marketplace.

 Residential Statistics - Guilford

Clearly you can see from the above, there currently a large amount of competition. While the market isn't dead, there are many properties for sale now - competing for a roughly the same amount of buyers who are looking at everything and determining the biggest value for their dollar. It is clearly still a Buyer's market and will probably continue for the rest of 2008. Also the prospect of selling your home quickly is not as good as it was several years ago unless it is well priced and then we see sales in a far shorter period of time.  As a seller, you will have to exercise patience. What can you do? As stated above, you need to get realistic, creative, and sometimes even a little luck might help.

We could add that the average sales prices is indeed going up but here's where the area is grey. There are sales in the very upper price regions i.e. waterfront, that continue to be strong and bring the average sales price up. But... you need to know that in reality, most activity is happening in the market area under $650,000 and that prices in that market are really going down, if just a bit. Given the great rates of appreciation we experienced for so long from 1994 to early 2006, this appears to be very dramatic. Not really, it is just that we need to look objectively at the actual past sales when pricing our properties.

We will never sugarcoat the reality of things or tell you what you want to hear. We will tell you straight up what you need to hear about your home and the marketplace you wish to buy or sell in. It is also a time to get serious about marketing your home with respect to pricing, financing options, staging or other creative issues.