Etch-A-Sketch Real Estate
From OhioArt.com
How cool would it be if we could just reset the local real estate market in greater Cincinnati by picking up an “Etch-A-Sketch” and giving it a good shake?
Great publicity for a Etch-A-Sketch this week- so much so that their sales jumped 1500%. That sort of increase in the local Cincinnati real estate market might require some heavy duty shaking, etching then sketching.
So let’s take a look at the past week and see where the “etch-a-sketch” approach would have been useful:
- Mortgage interest rates crept up to above 4%. Still unbelievably low -but apparently not low enough to entice people to begin moving up or to downsize- something our real estate market needs.
- Automotive sales are way up. Good news for the car manufacturers but people who buy new cars usually don’t go out and buy a piece of real estate immediately.
- Bank of America announced a new program “Mortgage to Lease” to help current homeowners stay in their property in lieu of short sale or foreclosure. Stay tuned for results.
- According to RealtyBizNews “Nearly 73 percent of a group of Americans said they’d never heard of the two primary programs in the Obama Administration’s Making Home Affordable initiative – the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) and the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP) – according to a survey by Survey Sampling International.” The number is scary since this is one Washington’s major initiatives to improve the housing market.
- Trulia’s Report on “Is It Cheaper to Rent” had some interesting facts….it’s actually cheaper to buy.
- According to CoreLogic “Shadow Inventory” remains flat. This can mean one of two things- either the number of distressed properties is decreasing and buyers are snapping up deals quickly…or banks and financial institutions are sitting on tons of houses and condos waiting for the market to pick up before offering them for sale. Unfortunately for us-it’s most likely the latter and we can expect to see distressed properties hitting the markets in waves for the next year or so…at least.
So how many shakes and recalibrations did you just make? Except for slightly higher mortgage rates and the Trulia report about owning versus renting- I know I was shaking my “etch-a-sketch” to reset some of bullet points. Finally the ultimate tribute to “Etch-A-Sketch” by email me.
