Boston Real Estate | What to Expect From Boston’s Housing Market

Purchasing property now in Boston is a gamble. You have got to have all the right cards. These include credit, capital, and long term security. Sure, these may sound obvious, but in today’s market, home sellers and the banks issuing loans are looking closely at potential investors. Real Estate is still a commodity. People are just taking a higher level of morality and opportunism to it. If you are in the market to buy, be sure to work with a trusted real estate professional. Then, if all the cards are right, you can bet on a big win. The latest Standard & Poor’s real estate report showed average home values in Greater Boston plummeting by 8 percent in one year. And that was the good news. The new S&P/Case-Shiller home price indices continued a trend that we’ve seen for much of the past year. The Boston area’s real estate market has been considerably weak, with values declining when compared to the same time a year ago. But this region is still outperforming nearly every other metro area in the country. There were only two out of 20 metro areas that outperformed Greater Boston: Homes in the Dallas and Denver regions were the “winnersâ€? in this losing game by shedding â€?onlyâ€? nearly 6 percent of their home values from March 2008 to March 2009. Meanwhile, the Las Vegas, Phoenix and San Francisco metro areas continued to get clobbered, with average price declines of at least 30 percent in each region. The average value among all 20 metro areas surveyed in the report fell by 18.7 percent in March compared with the same month a year ago. The price declines accelerated in certain metro areas during the past winter. New York, which has been losing jobs because of the financial industry’s problems, saw home prices drop by 2.5 percent in one month from February to March. Detroit, which is heavily burdened by the auto industry’s woes, suffered a decline in home values of 4.9 percent from February to March. Minneapolis, meanwhile, was rocked by the largest month-to-month price decline of any metro area in the history of the Case-Shiller indices, as prices in that region fell 6.1 percent from February to March. All of this carnage may come as little consolation to someone in Bridgewater or Braintree who is struggling to sell their home in the face of current market conditions. But we should consider beating most of the country to be a victory – even if it feels like a hollow one right now. So there you have it, Boston is in place to make some major changes in its real estate market. The best idea is to invest when capital, credit and security is all in place.