Crain’s reports that Midwestern new home sales increased in August over the previous month by 20.5%. This is in contrast to the national decline of new home sales. Year over year, however, new home sales in the Mid-west are down 11.2%. Existing home sales in Chicago are down for the 17th month in a row, with a 20.1% decrease in August. NPR’s <em>Marketplace</em> reports that nationally there is a 10 month supply of residential inventory that needs to be soaked up before we will see a return to stronger market conditions.

This dovetails with a prediction by Diane Swonk, Senior Managing Director & Chief Economist for Mesirow Financial, who said at Rubloff’s Fall All Company meeting that we should look for an upswing in housing by next summer. The business sector is strong, interest rates are low, inflation seems to be in check, and consumer spending is healthy. Housing suffers from an oversupply.

The ups and downs of statistics seem a bit confusing. Uncertainty is the biggest factor in the real estate market now. But the one fact you can glean from these numbers is that if you are buying or selling a home, find an experienced agent and listen to their advice. Pricing to the market is crucial. When your agent tells you a lower price will sell your home faster, you need to listen to them. It is times like these where experienced real estate agents prove their worth.

It is crucial in this changing climate that we relay to our clients that pricing their home correctly is the most important step to take when selling their home. We frequently notice that sellers push to price their homes according to previous years’ market price highs and then wonder why it is extremely difficult to attract buyers. Market prices change constantly — the fact that your client’s neighbor sold his/her home for a certain price a year ago, does not guarantee that their home will sell for the same amount. Conversely, we have found that realistically priced homes are still selling quickly regardless of what may be relayed in the media.

Welcome to to Rubloff’s inaugural Blog. We decided to launch this effort in order to establish a dialogue with realtors, clients and the public at large on what is happening in the world of Chicago real estate as well as informative regional and national trends.

We look forward to sharing news, ideas, and information about Rubloff and the real estate industry.

As web marketing increases in importance, Rubloff is putting more emphasis on technology. Our efforts to “optimize” our search engine results using key words (Rubloff.com’s page rank when a consumer searches on the Internet) have resulted in an average 386,000 unique viewers each month, 47% more viewers than last year.

In addition to Tribune.com and Realtor.com, you can now see Rubloff listings on the following web-sites:

Trulia.com
Searchchicago.suntimes.com/homes
Google.com
Luxuryrealestate.com (listings over $1.5 million)

This fall, we are adding the following web sites:

Chicagojournal.com
Zillow.com
Dailyherald.com