Hello world!

The average price of single family detached homes has hit a new high of nearly $236K, up more than 6% from the previous high reached early in 2007.

Low mortgage interest rates are allowing buyers to purchase “more” home than they could have in the past, and it is translating to higher prices.

Often times, real estate reports suggest that this directly equates to appreciation for homeowners, but we have to dig a little deeper to ensure that rising prices paid by buyers means more money for sellers.

See what our deep dive found in this week’s one-page special report.

Median home values have moved more than 4% higher in 2018 when compared to all of 2017.

Today, “the middle” resale home in the market is worth $119 per square foot, which has 2018 on pace to become the third highest year on record (trailing only 2006 and 2007).

Home values bottomed in 2012 at $90 per square foot, so the current reading suggests that median home values have increased more than 32% in just 6 years.

See how we use this to project future home values in Tallahassee in this week’s one-page special report.

Home sales in the third quarter were the same in 2018 as they were in the third quarter of 2017, a continuing sign that the housing market recovery is cooling off.

Nevertheless, year-to-date home sales are at a twelve year high, having only been bettered by the years circled in today’s report (2004, 2005, and 2006).

Overall, the market is up about 2.5% over this time last year (we expect to see more home sales posted for September by real estate agents who are late to report), but not so much as to greatly impact today’s message.

The biggest question from this report is whether or not we see a cooling market as “negative” or “positive,” and you can see my opinion in this week’s one-page special report.

I had to dig deep to find an image of the Tallahassee real estate market that we have not used in many years.

Before we had access to powerful spreadsheets and database programs, we would simply record average home prices each year, sort them by home size, and we could roughly determine appreciation by measuring the changes that occurred over time.

The graph in today’s special report does this very thing, so how have you done during the time you’ve owned your home?

Home sales declined in August, pretty much wiping out the huge gain posted in July.

When we look at July and August of this year, there were only three more homes sold than there were in the same two months last year.

So where does that put 2018 in the grand scheme of the recovery?

You can find out in this week’s one-page special report.