If You Lived Here, You’d Be Appreciating By Now

My absence from regular blogging, my accounting spreadsheet, and the fact that I’ve had dinner with the family about 10 days out of the last 100, attest to the fact that I have been very busy.  Mostly with first-time homebuyers who want to take advantage of the first-time homebuyer tax credit, but our market is just plain hopping.  Got something to sell below $250,000?  We’ve probably got a buyer for you. We very likely have a buyer for you.

I’ve had a few houses not appraise because the appraisals are not keeping up with the pace of the market (which is another post for another time).  I’ve had clients go looking for For Sale By Owners because nothing was available on the MLS.  I’ve had a client make four different offers, three of which were very good, and he lost out on all of them.  But all of that is anecdotal evidence of a fast-paced market.

Finally, today, in black and white, CNN Money confirmed all of our suspicions  – our market is only moving up.

This is my favorite sentence –

The biggest winner will be the Kennewick, Wash., metro area, where home prices have ramped up 8.9% over the past three years and are expected to increase another 3.4% by June 2010.

Looks like breakfast will need to become the everyone-eating-together meal at our house for the foreseeable future.