Forbes: Where Home Values Are Falling Fast
As the U.S. government struggles to devise ways to keep struggling homeowners out of foreclosure, there are some parts of the country where the problem is much worse than others.
Forbes magazine used data from Zillow.com to identify cities where homeowners are losing value fastest. Cities like Sacramento, Calif., Phoenix, and Las Vegas don’t show up on the list because the massive numbern of foreclosures has already wiped out so much homeowner’s equity. Cities where owners’ equity is still dropping are places where prices were high and there is still plenty of room for them to fall.
Here are the 10 places where home owners are losing value fastest:
- Virginia Beach, Va.
- Yuma, Ariz.
- Cumberland, Md.
- Bakersfield, Calif.
- El Centro, Calif.
- Orlando, Fla.
- Miami
- Visalia, Calif.
- Port Saint Lucie, Fla.
- Salem, Ore.
Source: Forbes, Matt Woolsey
How about homes on the South Carolina coast, in the Charleston area? There are currently over 10,000 active listings in the Charleston Tri-County area (Charleston, Berkeley, Dorchester counties). This hasn’t changed much since 2007- the number of listings was only down by 1.3%
The number of new listings was down by 21.2%. And closed sales went from 10,048 in 2007 to 6939 thus far in 2008- a drop of 30.9%! Based on statistics from the last three months, real estate on the East Islands (Sullivan’s Island and Isle of Palms including Wild Dunes) has an average list price of $1,128,103, an average sales price of $1.003,604. Average number of days on the market is 244 days. There are 603 active listings on the East Islands. Much of the slowing has occurred in the past three months, as market fears and tight lending standards have caused people to wait to buy. This combined with the fact that many are waiting for the “bottom”. Unfortunately, we usually don’t know when the “bottom” is until the market is already on the way back up! If we only had a crystal ball………
