February Homes Sales Report Revisited

Just what you wanted this week, more numbers, right? Josh Flory over at Property Scope has done his write-up on the Knoxville February Home Sales Report and he asks an interesting question:

"The median price for homes with two or fewer bedrooms, or four-plus bedrooms dropped, though. At the small end of the spectrum, the median price fell by a whopping 19.9 percent, to $62,500, while the median price at the high end fell by 3.7 percent, to $240,000.

Any thoughts on why this happened? One interesting quirk is the fact that there were 14 homes in the smallest category that sold for less than $20,000 in February, compared to only three in that category during February of 2007."

I have no idea about the homes under $20,000 quirk, but as for the other, I think the answer has to do with the tightened mortgage qualificaiton criteria. People who would have bought on the lower end last year simply could not qualify this year, while folks looking to buy on the high side wound up qualifying for less loan and had to buy less house.

Does that make sense to anybody else or have I not had enough coffee today?