January 2014 Market Update

If you are looking for details about my commission split to charity, please click here.

Market Reports: I love talking about Market Reports. I have a few below that I find helpful.



1. Zillow November 2014 Review

According to Zillow, Negative equity is continually decreasing, this is evident by more sellers selling while median price year over year has not increased as much as the national average. Lehigh and Northampton Counties are lagging the national average in regard to price accretion. It is my opinion, that as negative equity continues to decrease, this back log of supply will stymie and prices will increase. Forks Township had a great year by increasing 7% in annual median price.



2. Bank Owned vs Non-bank Owned properties:

To reiterate, according to the Zillow report the, Lehigh Valley has lagged the national average. So why is this? I believe the supply of bank owned properties has a lot to do with median being static. When there is a "shadow inventory" of bank owned properties, this means the banks have a lot of homes going through the short sale and foreclosure process. They do not release all of these properties to the market at the same time as it would hurt the collective value of their portfolio of assets.

However, if prices remain static, which they have in the Lehigh Valley, the stream of foreclosures remains steady, holding back the overall median price of the market. According to this chart, the supply is dissipating, especially compared to Jan 13  to Jan 14.


3. Federal Housing Finance Agency


I keep this report for reference from month to month: The FHFA is a pretty cool index because it only pertains to mortgage resale's where the mortgages are owned by FHFA, Freddie, and Fannie. The reason that its a different kind of index is it differentiates between cash buyers and buyer's using investor financing. Its also nice because it does a good job of comparing different metro's. The link I provided compares Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and the Lehigh Valley.


4. Here is a BHHS Fox and Roach's


Northampton County

Lehigh County


I think the video reporter does a pretty good job of taking a few metrics and succinctly giving their meaning.