Though real estate sales have been down for over a year, some Lakes Region real estate agents think they are ready to rebound.
“I think we’re getting close to the bottom,” said Timothy Perry, sales manager at Krainin Real Estate and president of the Western Maine Board of Realtors, adding he is receiving more inquiries lately.
Gorham resident Heather Coppola, of Gorham, who recently listed her second home in Bridgton with Century 21. Coppola looked at what was on the market and what sold for several months before setting her price in the middle of the range.
“I’m optimistic,” said Coppola about trying to sell the four-bedroom home on Highland Lake for $595,000, which is close to what she paid for the property four or five years ago. She has been renting it to help pay the bills, but Coppola said she doesn’t use the house enough to make it worth owning.
Coppola may stand a better chance of selling her property than others, as it is the higher priced waterfront and lower priced residential properties that are selling the best, according the Andrea Sawyer, real estate agent with Krainin Real Estate. After a slow winter and spring, Sawyer said the last two months have been busier.
February and March are typically busy months for the company, Sawyer said, with those buying waterfront properties hoping to get in by Memorial Day. This year the phones weren’t ringing and Sawyer was seeing one pending sale, one sale and 24 price reductions for every 25 new listings in the Lakes Region.
“It was dead as a doornail,” Sawyer said, adding that she hasn’t seen the market this bad since the recession in the early 1990s.
Krainin Real Estate, with offices in Naples, Raymond and Bridgton, sells around two-thirds waterfront properties and one-third residential, Sawyer said. The company also has a large rental department.
With sales low, a large inventory of properties built up. Within a radius of 10 miles from the middle of Sebago Lake there are 500 active listings, according to Marie Prescott, a real estate agent with Century 21’s Standish office.
Prescott said the average time a property stays on the market is 60 days if the property is priced aggressively, six to nine months if not priced aggressively. Some properties stay on the market for two years, Prescott said. During the housing boom in 2004-2005, the only properties that didn’t sell within 30 days had something wrong with them or were grossly overpriced.
Century 21’s Standish office listings are more than 90 percent non-waterfront properties.
“We are way over inventory right now,” Sawyer said, estimating that there is a two-year inventory of houses on the market right now.
Real estate sales in Cumberland County dropped almost 17 percent from July 2007 to July 2008, according to the Maine Real Estate Information System Inc. The median sale price also dropped by just over 6 percent. In the Lakes Region sales numbers were almost identical from July 2007 to July 2008 – 91 sales in 2007 and 90 in 2008.
Co-owner of ERA Today Realty in Naples and Windham Todd Harvey said he has noticed an increase in real estate activity in the past month, after a couple of years of excess inventory and a slower than usual market. Sellers are lowering prices, Harvey said, and buyers are starting to get off the fence.
Lower prices create difficulties for some recent homeowners though, who now owe more than what their properties are worth. When they have difficulty making payments, sometimes they have to sell for less than they owe. If they default on their payments, their property can go into foreclosure.
“There are a lot of people right on the edge,” Sawyer said, adding that if heating oil goes up she thinks foreclosures will get worse.
Despite the recent upturn, Harvey said he isn’t seeing as much interest from first-time homebuyers than in the past, which he attributes partially to the misconception that mortgages aren’t available to them.
“Everybody’s been walking on egg shells,” Harvey said, adding that he expects people to be less hesitant to invest after the November election.
“It’s a cycle,” Sawyer said. “We’re in the downside of the cycle.”
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