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Anna Maria Island Real Estate: Is now the time to Buy?

Time to Buy That Beach House?

 Whether you're an investor looking to add some property that you can sell for a profit down the road or just a buyer hoping to obtain a new home for your family, the decision to buy a house is huge. The whole market can seem like something completely alien to the average person. Is this a good time to look at buying a house on Anna Maria Island, Longboat key or the Bradenton area? And how can I even know if it is or isn't the right time to look at jumping in to real estate? Most of us don't understand all of the words and numbers being tossed around in news reports on home prices. Let's see if we can carve through all of that confusion and get to an answer.

 

If we want information about the state of the housing market, the National Association of Realtors seems like a good place to start. According to them, it's a great time to be looking at making a purchase. Interest rates are low and so are home prices. However, while prices are still lower than usual, how long they'll remain that way is difficult to know. In fact, the national average sales price for houses rose by ten percent in February and March compared to the same months just a year ago.

 There simply aren't as many homes available to purchase as we might normally see. A lot of homeowners are holding on to property until they see the market start reaching the sorts of numbers that we saw in 2006. That's when they made their purchase, and they aren't willing to eat a significant loss on a sale now. At the same time, construction of new houses is starting to get back on track, but it has a lot of bouncing back to do after years of minimal building.

 

On the other hand, there might be more potential buyers out there than would normally be expected. That same lack of available housing means that rent rates are increasing rapidly. If you could realistically purchase a house with a lower monthly mortgage payment than what you're paying now for rent, why wouldn't you be interested in owning your own home? And just like many sellers have been waiting to see what happens in the housing market, buyers have spent a few years parked on the side of the road to see if the traffic clears. Now that it has, and the price of the average home is down, they're putting the car in drive and getting back on to the highway.

So we have a glut of buyers hoping to land a property for cheaper than it might end up being worth, but also a lack of homes available for them to choose from. That doesn't sound like a market that will remain inexpensive for long. And it won't. Of course, as the prices go up, more of those hesitant sellers will begin to put their house on the market since it would now fetch a price more to their liking. So that side of it would seem to be fairly self-balancing, though certainly at a price level higher than what we're seeing now. That brings us to interest rates.

And interest rates remain the great unknown in all of this. Rates are currently low to try to spur the sort of increase in home purchases and new construction that we're beginning to see. How long rates will remain that low is the mystery. At what point will the recovery be declared secure enough that they're bumped up a notch or two? We simply don't know.

 Really, it comes down to what it always has come down to : Can you afford to make a buy in the current market? Maybe your credit was shattered like that of so many others, so it might make sense to spend a few years rebuilding that rating before diving back in. Or maybe you simply aren't in a position to make a big purchase right now. There's no shame in any of that. Just be honest about your own financial health and where it's likely to be in the near future, and decide for yourself if the time is right for you to be buying a house.