Salt Lake City Real Estate Blog

The new model home village is up and running in Daybreak. The village called Daybreak North Shore, is Daybreak’s third, the first two being Founders Village and East Lake Village. There is a noticeable difference in this phase, there are far more homes in the starter home category. If you are looking for homes under $200,000, Daybreak offers far more opportunities in North Shore than in the previous phases. (more…)

At the start of this month, Fannie Mae changed its policy regarding declining markets. Previously if you were in a declining market you had to put 10% down in order to obtain a loan. Now the policy has changed so that regardless of the state of the local real estate market buyers only need to put 5% down, i.e. they can obtain a 95% mortgage instead of a 90% mortgage. This change will obviously make it easier for first time buyers to enter the market and hopefully create an increased demand at the low end of the market.

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.

According to the Governor’s Office of Planning and Budget, the economy in Utah is still one of the best in the nation. The November Economic Summary, dated November 27, 2007, shows year-over job growth in Utah of 4.2% in October 2007, more than triple the national rate of 1.2%. Approximately 52,500 jobs were created in Utah in the last year. The unemployment rate continued to be very low in October 2007 at 2.8%, compared with the national unemployment rate of 4.7% for the same time period.

The Report went on to give a favorable economic outlook for 2008, stating that economic growth was expected to continue to be robust, though moderate. Employment growth is expected to slow from 4.5% in 2007 to 3.2% in 2008 and the unemployment rate should increase from the record low of 2.7% for 2007 to 2.9% in 2008. Residential construction is expected to continue to further weaken. However, the trend, which started in 2007, of a shift from residential to commercial construction is expected to continue.

The Summary Report is released on a monthly basis and contains a lot of great information about the demographics, wages, employment, GDP, CPI, interest rates and home prices for the state of Utah. The report can be found on http://governor.utah.gov/dea/ , then click on the Economic Summary link. Alternatively, there is the 2007 Governor’s Report, a 40 page report of various economic data. Just click on the Economic Report to the Governor link.

OK so I recently purchased a new PC with Windows Vista. I loaded all my old software onto the PC and most things seemed to work OK except for Top Producer 7i. No panic, Top Producer was always a pain to get up and running so I followed the suggestions in the help docs just like I have done in the past for XP machines. Still did not work. Last resort, I phoned tech support. They took me through a completely different set to options to change from those needed for XP and guess what it now works.

So to sum up Top Producer does work in Vista but you will need to call tech support to get it up and running.

Oh and just one more thing, my Windows Sidebar seems to have now stopped working. Now I wonder if one of the options I had to change for Top Producer caused this to stop working. Guess I need to do a bit more digging.