Located in Anderson County on Raccoon Valley Road at Claxton.
Play VisualTour

The seller of this delightful country home will consider a lease purchase, call me for details.

Here’s my weekly report on Knox County real estate transfers. I’m coming to you today from San Diego, California where I’m attending the National Association of Realtors (NAR) annual Conference & Expo. It’s been a whirlwind week here of great learning experiences and a huge trade show of new real estate products. I’m heading home early Monday morning.

Below is the Knox County Register of Deeds real estate transfers for the week just passed.

Again this week, no surprises. There were 162 Knox County Real Estate transfers last week with the majority in the lower price points. According to National Association of Realtors statistics first time home buyers have been as much as 45% of the total market.

Recently Congress passed a bill extending the $8,000 tax credit until April 30th of 2010 which should help continue the current sales trends. Hopefully the addition to a similar credit for current homeowners will encourage that group to re-enter the market in the higher prices ranges when they sell an existing home they own.A recent report from NAR says short sales and foreclosures also continue to be a very significant percentage of sales.

“The annual survey of home buyers (not REALTORS®), suggests that the first-time buyer accounts for 45 percent of all buyers. The number of distressed sales, those that are short sales or foreclosed sales, made up 29 percent of all sales in September. It accounted for 45 to 50 percent of all sales late last year and in the early months of this year.”

Here’s what NAR’s chief economist, Lawrence Yun said recently about the housing market:

“We have to be mindful that the tax credit is not only about people in the market. Despite spectacular gains in the stock market, principally from the financial sector recovery, most of the 75 million home-owning families have more wealth tied to their homes. Home values could soon turn consistently positive and help the broad base of middle-class families, but we are not there yet. We’re getting early indications of price stabilization, but we need a steady supply of qualified buyers to meaningfully bring inventories down and return us to a period of normal, steady price growth and to fully remove consumer fears, which would then revive the broader economy. Without a firm foundation for middle-class wealth recovery, the post-recession economic growth likely will be one of the weakest in U.S. history.“

Please feel free to comment or ask questions about any portion of the Knoxville area real estate market. If I don’t have the answer I do have access to some of the best sources available and will get the answer for you right away.

www.KnoxvilleHomeCenter.com is the ‘go to’ place to search for all Knoxville area houses, condos, land, lots, and commercial properties. Give me a call or email if you find some you would like to take a look at.