Salt Lake City Real Estate Blog

Home prices for the first quarter 2008 are out, Salt Lake Home Prices. For the first time in a long time, more zip codes went down in value than increased in value. The average home price for Salt Lake County is now $287,119, which is a 0.33% increase from last years average home price of $286,170. That’s not too bad given the rest of the U.S. market. What’s worrying are the days on market and number of homes sold figures. In the first quarter 2008 DOM was 58, that’s an increase of 45% and there were 1820 homes sold, which is a decrease of 42.82%.

If you compare current home prices against the third quarter 2007 (this was the high point in prices), you see a larger decline. The average home price in the third quarter 2007 was $309,876, which means prices have declined 7.34%.

I have been updating our listings to incorporate the new Google Street View functionality. You can see an example here: Draper Rambler. It’s pretty easy to do, and it provides some useful features, particularly for out-of-state buyers who are not familiar with an area.

While places like California and Florida saw their home prices decline over the last year, Utah was a different story. Home prices for the fourth quarter 2007 went up 9.27% compared to the same quarter in 2006, which was the largest increase in all 50 states. What’s more, that was the fifth consecutive quarter Utah led the nation in house price appreciation.

At a city level, four out of the top 10 cities were in Utah, Salt Lake City no. 7, Ogden-Clearfield no. 4, Provo-Orem no. 6 and Logan was no. 8.

However, all good things come to an end. The Utah housing market has slowed considerably over the last couple of quarters and the home sales data for the first quarter 2008 is due to show a considerable tightening of the market. The number of homes sold is way down on last year’s numbers, (for example, 687 in Feb 2008 compared to 1,148 in Feb 2007) and the days on market are climbing accordingly.