ECB's Wild Ride

Recently, I was looking at market data for the last couple of months for the Downtown Ogden area. It seemed to me that sales were very low for this time of year. Rather than just scratch my head and move on to something else, I started doing the research. Here is sales volume for the East Central Bench Historic District in Downtown Ogden for the last 4 years.



Winter months are blue. This is an interesting chart...at least to me. I think its interesting because this chart defies the normal seasonal cycle that you see in the county based chart from the earlier post. One thing you can see is the huge surge from the summer of 2007 followed by a complete drop off. March and April 2008 sales volume are the lowest in at least 4 years. I will have to go back farther in the data to complete this story.

What are the reasons for the drop off? I believe that due to ECB's non-traditional (i.e. bread and butter suburban style) housing supply, the market in this neighborhood is affected differently than the overall marketplace. Investors make up about 50% of the home owners in this neighborhood. Its reasonable to assume that they are therefore 50% of the buyers in the marketplace. The marketplace is also attractive to those with less than stellar credit. They can purchase an affordable home and still have payments that make sense for their incomes. Since August both of these buyer categories have been under assault by the banks. I believe this explains the significant decline.

I will put another chart together later that shows price movement over this period. From what I saw while mulling through the data it has made some amazing changes for the better over the last 4 years. Stay tuned for that info.