Florida State University, FL

Tallahassee Home Values have declined by roughly 33% across the entire market coverage area, but we are seeing the rate of decline slow over the past six months. While I am not certain that this is anything more than a seasonal fluctuation, I’ll take it as some moderately positive news for a housing market that has shown very little positive news in the past few years.

Normally, we graph the one-year trend in order to remove all seasonality, but the six month trend often provides insight on the “here and now” view of the market, which is critical information for somebody who is thinking about selling a home. The first real estate graph below shows the six month trend in home values for each quadrant of Tallahassee (Leon County). One trend that is immediately obvious is that east side homes are doing much better than their counterparts on the west side.

Northeast Tallahassee Home Values

Northeast Tallahassee home values have declined by 31% since the peak of the housing market, with the average home value in June coming in at $113 per square foot and an average home price of $238,600. You can note that the graph below shows the trend has been dropping for five straight years.

Northwest Tallahassee Home Values

Northwest home values have dropped 52% since the peak of the housing market, and home values in June dropped to $65 per square foot and recorded an average northwest Tallahassee home price of $109,000.

Southeast Tallahassee Home Values

Home values in the Southeast have dropped 37% since the peak of the market, and home sales in June showed an average value of $94 per square foot and an average home price of $161,000.

Southwest Tallahassee Home Values

Home values in Southwest Tallahassee are down 52% since the top of the market, with June closings recording an average value of $64 per square foot and an average price of $106,400. This average price is up significantly from the $60K range that the Southwest has been seeing for the past year or so, but that is due to the fact that out of 11 sales in Southwest Tallahassee in June, two were over $200K. The previous $200K sale in the southwest was in June of 2010.

Home Sellers Must Decide

The market is weak and home buyers are few. If you have to sell a home in Tallahassee, price it to sell fast. Though we see some value stabilization due to summer seasonality, this most likely will be fading in the coming weeks. Use an aggressive home marketing plan, coupled with the right price, and you can have your home sold before the end of the summer.

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Holy cow, I have to agree with Lawrence Yun on quite a few points that he made during the release of the monthly  Existing Home Sales Report last week. Dr. Yun, the chief economist for the National Association of REALTORS® explained that existing home sales in March were down compared to March of last year, and there exists more than 8 months of supply of homes for sale at a national level.

As we know from our own Tallahassee housing reports, 5 to 6 months of supply are considered a balanced market and anything higher than that produces a buyer’s market and home values do not appreciate due to the intense competition among home sellers. Dr. Yun made a case for the need to have the mortgage market return to traditional lending standards, noting

“sales would be notably stronger if mortgage lending would return to the normal, safe standards that were in place a decade ago – before the loose lending practices that created the unprecedented boom and bust cycle,”

I agree that the mortgage market must come around to pre-2002 standards where the rate of default was low and people with good credit were able to get loans to buy homes. The demand side of the market is my biggest concern, because people who have recently sold a home have little or no cash from the sale. It is the cash from the sale of their previous home that has been traditionally used as the equity or down payment to purchase the following home. Yun reported:

low-downpayment loans should continue to be available for those consumers who have demonstrated financial responsibility and are willing to stay well within their budget.

And this is exactly opposite of what is occurring in the mortgage markets. The amount of cash required by homebuyers at closing is on the rise, and I believe changing the down-payment requirements on loans that traditionally have had a low default rate is now hurting the market as much or more than any other singular factor. As I wrote in “Housing Market Needs New Type Of Fix” one year ago, the absence of no-money down loans has put a squeeze on the real estate market.

Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist

The following short video was released by NAR, and it contains Dr. Yun’s commentary on the state of the housing market and the report of existing home sales through the month of March.

REMINDER: This Saturday is the big May Family Dollar For Diabetes Car Wash. Help Haley May raise money for this important charity. You can download a flyer for the car wash here.

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Black hat techniques are short cuts designed to make the search engines believe that your site is far more relevant to a topic than visitors will find. These techniques are often tantalizing to internet marketing professionals because they promise to bring immediate traffic (and immediate results), but unfortunately they most likely will guarantee the eventual destruction of your website.

Key-word stuffing is an old, classic example of this type of activity. Rather than create an article or page on your site that contains valuable information for the reader, many pages are created with a gross overuse of key words designed to fool the search engines to believe that the site has a focus on a specific subject.

I am sure that you have stumbled across pages on the internet where you just wonder what in the heck the creator was thinking. As an example, imagine my real estate site having a page with copy that says “welcome to the Tallahassee real estate web site featuring all the answers to your Tallahassee real estate questions. We are the experts in real estate in Tallahassee and can help you buy a home in Tallahassee ….” This type of action will move you to Google’s sandbox (Google’s rumored filtering algorithm for anti-spam purposes) as soon as they discover it.

Ultimately, in deciding upon the techniques and processes that your site will employ, just know that anything worth reading will most likely fall under white hat techniques, while anything that is geared more to the search engine spiders will probably be deemed black hat. Additionally, since the ultimate goal of a website for a brick and mortar business is to attract and retain customers who will buy the products and services of the company, most black hat techniques will be counter productive.

Do not be fooled into thinking that “any traffic is good traffic,” rather we want to build a site that delivers visitors with a high conversion rate. The real reason that black hat techniques are not good for a company website is that they attract the wrong type of visitors and they only serve to upset the visitors that the company wants to attract.

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