I’ve put together a short but interesting market update for real estate in all of Forsyth County. This includes Lake Lanier, Cumming and Gainesville addresses and should provide a high level overview of the current market climate for the county. These number reflect sales from January through August 2009.

If you take a look at the chart below, there are two really important things to point out about the numbers in the chart. First, note that there is an average list price and average original list price. The AOLP refers to when the property was originally put on the market. The ALP is the list price at the time the home was put under contract.

	Units Sold	Sales Volume	Avg. Sales Price	SP/LP	Avg List Price	SP/OLP	Avg Original List Price	Avg. DOM	Avg. Total DOM
Forsyth County	1315	390,781,653	$280,288	93.5%	$300,284	81.35%	$344,533	106	152

Then, look at the average sales price to list price(SP/LP) compared to the average sales price to original list price (SP/OLP). What these two things point out is that homes are still being put on the market at too high of a price. Additionally, it indicates that we have been, and probably still are for short while to come, in a declining market.

My personal opinion is that we have bottomed and are just now starting to see improvements. I believe these improvements will continue into next year and we’ll have a much stronger spring/summer than we had in 2009.

Finally, here are a few other interesting bullet points relative to the market in Forsyth County:

1. Home sales above $750,000 account for less than 4% of all sales. The high-end market continues to suffer, probably from down-payment requirements and difficulties with the jumbo loan market.
2. The majority of sales in Forsyth have occur ed in the $300k - $500k range, followed as you would expect, by the $250k - $300k range.
3. Properties under $150k tend to sell at the highest SP/LP - around 97%.

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