Wowie Zowie Uncle Howie!

Well guess what? The numbers are in and, contrary to popular belief; people DID indeed buy houses in Omaha, Nebraska last year.

According to our industry numbers there were 8,796 properties closed through our MLS system last year. Those numbers do not include any ‘for sale by owners’ or any of our local ‘production builders’ like Celebrity or Hearthstone which pushes the number up even more. Granted, that is down from 10,491 in 2007 but most of the news reports last year gave us the impression that nobody, that’s right, nobody was buying at all. All-in-all we had approximately a 16% drop in number of closed properties.

I took a totally unscientific straw poll of about 20 people and asked them the following question: "Based on what you’ve heard or read last year about our local real estate market, what percentage would you estimate our number of sales had decreased by?" You can probably guess how that was answered, most were in the 30-40% range, a couple around 50% but not one person guessed under 20%. Hmmm.

What does that say for ’09? Well, we could line up a dozen ‘experts’ and obviously get a dozen different outlooks but the bottom line is this: Mortgage rates are at or near a fifty (yes 50!) year low. There are still plenty of very reputable loan companies out there with billions of dollars to lend. Sure, the “fog a mirror and get a loan” days are pretty much over and our industry is back to more reasonable loan products, but a credit worthy buyer can still put as little as 3% down and get a great fixed rate loan.

Oh, and did I mention rates at or near a FIFTY YEAR LOW??? I think I did.

For more information about Omaha Real Estate, please email me at Bill.Swanson@cbshome.com or if you'd like a quick and easy online home evaluation, visit my website at: http://www.billswanson.com/