neohiorealtor.com Blog

With so much negative media attention on the real estate market around the country this year, it’s nice to see some positive attention for a change. The Plain Dealer published an article on June 25th titled “Cleveland housing prices up”. The article talked about the release of Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller home-price index and how the Cleveland market stacked up amongst 20 major markets listed (we ranked #7 out of the 20 markets, by the way!). I was also reading an economic report from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) put out by our Chief Economist, Lawrence Yun, that also put a smile on my face. His report shows that (in general) “home sales have stabilized over the last seven months and are expected to increase measurably in the rest of 2008″. According to Yun, we should expect to see the clearing up of the subprime lending problems through the rest of this year, but we should also be seeing improvements in both sales and prices in the coming year. As many people are already aware, real estate markets are very local. The Cleveland area did not have the huge bubbles that areas such as California or Florida had, so we haven’t faced the same kinds of problems they are facing. That’s a big part of why we are one of the first markets set to rise up! Now is the time to buy!