Housing Market in Knoxville (Knox Co.) (Morristown: transplants, for sale, loan) - Tennessee (TN) - City-Data Forum

hoosier07 · 04-03-2007, 02:11 PM

A post in the Nashville thread is giving an interesting comparison regarding the amount of homes available for sale....it appears that the numbers are increasing significantly in the past few weeks. I have seen reduced prices already in homes of up to $10,000 and I've been looking only for the past 4 weeks. Is this a real sign that homes are not selling as before and that home owners were expecting huge profits that are not according to the market reality ? Have anyone noticed the same in the Knoxville area ?

hiknapster · 04-03-2007, 02:47 PM

No. I'm not seeing that at all.

I've been following the Knoxville MLS closely since last December. I found that a lot of houses were bought up but no new ones were coming on the market. As MBMouse predicted, the last few weeks have seen a lot of houses going on the market. So no, I don't think houses are not selling.

Why are all these houses going on the market? MBMouse says that people put there houses up for sale in the spring, and she is clearly right. Maybe some of these people are getting disillusioned about all the transplants. Maybe some of the transplants found out they didn't like here after all, or couldn't get jobs. Maybe some got job transfers.

My guess would be that some are selling their homes and moving into all the new housing going up. In other words, they are trading up.

But I can say that prices are not going down, at all.

sliverbox · 04-03-2007, 03:09 PM

My dad mentioned that there seems to be a significant amount of homes on the market. I looked and there's almost 10,000 total properties in the surrounding area. That is a LOT for an area the size of Knoxville.
I've been studying the housing market for some time now and there was an opinion amoungst many that a lot of homeowners took their homes off the market this winter when they didn't sell in the summer and are now reposting them for what they hope will be a "spring bounce". But this might backfire because not only will all these existing homes land on the market, but so too will all the new properties for this year. So with a huge supply, this will cause demand to slip, and perhaps prices to fall.

people need to consider that many other states- including states like FL, NY, OH, MI, and so on- states that have been responsible for these transplants- are now doing pretty badly in terms of sales. So this might dry up more of the demand.

But all in all, I don't see insanely high prices in TN period. There are still MANY homes under the 100k mark, which nationally is still way less than what most people expect to pay. So if the prices never got out of control, then TN might simply have a slight period of depreciation but not on the same level as some of the other states. It might just keep right on staying the course with very conservative apprecciation.

hiknapster · 04-03-2007, 03:21 PM

Well, I didn't say they were going up to an insane degree.

But I think they have gone up since last December. But you are right, putting all those houses on the market could backfire, but I don't see a ton of them hitting the market. Not in my price range. Bear in mind, though, that this is a very small percentage of the market. I know they are building like mad, right now!

JMT · 04-03-2007, 03:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hiknapster

Well, I didn't say they were going up to an insane degree.

But I think they have gone up since last December. But you are right, putting all those houses on the market could backfire, but I don't see a ton of them hitting the market. Not in my price range. Bear in mind, though, that this is a very small percentage of the market. I know they are building like mad, right now!

I agree with you, hiknapster. I haven't noticed a big increase in houses on the market. I was just driving around today and hardly saw any homes for sale in my neighborhood or on the other side of Broadway (Lincoln Park).

And I've heard what mbmouse said, too: more people put their homes on the market in the spring than in the winter so that they can have their homes sold in time to move during the summer and not disrupt the school year.

silverbox, are those 10,000 homes just in Knox County? Or does that include the surrounding counties?

sliverbox · 04-03-2007, 03:43 PM

well hiknapster,
I can say that I do recall just a few years ago being able to look up homes in anywhere TN for 40-50k and would get HUNDREDS of houses. I would use these as examples of the insane extremes between where I live now in CA and there in TN... 50k versus 600k, a mere 12 times cheaper for the same house.

Now what I find is that those same homes are in the 75-150k range. But they have been sitting at that level for a long time now. So I wonder if that is the current ceiling. I also see a lot of new homes in the 3-400k range, which for TN is outright insanity and more likely for out-of-staters with heaps of cash and not the locals. Still- 100-150k is peanuts compared to most of the country these days. So as long as the supply keeps going up and the prices are within reason, or even fall a bit, I'm happy. I think the boom is now over, the subprime loan fiasco is now well underway, and TN will likely dodge the fallout or see severe price escalation. That's both good for the economy, the state, and the citizens- even those that want to see their homes appreciate faster.

sliverbox · 04-03-2007, 03:47 PM

silverbox, are those 10,000 homes just in Knox County? Or does that include the surrounding counties?

clarification: those numbers are for the surrounding immediate counties as well. But on closer examination, that number was just for residential and didn't include lots, acreage, or multi-family units. All together, Knox county and the immediate surrounding areas have close to 25,000 properties listed right now. So while not huge, there's lots of choices.

JMT · 04-03-2007, 03:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sliverbox

silverbox, are those 10,000 homes just in Knox County? Or does that include the surrounding counties?

clarification: those numbers are for the surrounding immediate counties as well. But on closer examination, that number was just for residential and didn't include lots, acreage, or multi-family units. All together, Knox county and the immediate surrounding areas have close to 25,000 properties listed right now. So while not huge, there's lots of choices.

Yeah that doesn't seem too bad. The population is over 700,000, so there are probably 200,000+ homes. If 10,000 are up for sale, that's only 5'ish percent. That doesn't seem too extreme, particularly when one considers all the new homes that are being built (3500 in Knox County alone in 2005 according to city-data.com).

sliverbox · 04-03-2007, 04:12 PM

we will see. The season has just barely kicked off here in California, and the number of homes I see with paint being quickly slapped on is pretty high. remember that our warm weather starts earlier, so Tn can't be that far behind.

hoosier07 · 04-03-2007, 05:29 PM

I'm looking at houses for the past months in the East Knoxville Area (suburbs) and Morristown.....I really believe prices in Morristown are WAY out of the reality with 1,800 square feet homes with asking prices in the $190,000....I found new homes in East Knoxville with the same square feet for approx. $175,000 average, so I agree that the market is more realist in Knoxville and these cities are so close.....at the same time....the builders continue to build new homes and subdvisions and I can see several homes ready for sale and several others under construction....let's see how long they will stay in the market.....