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%.

The 2nd quarter 2007 home prices are now available for Salt Lake County, Utah County and Davis County. On the surface everything looks OK with the vast majority of zip codes seeing their home prices showing double digit increases compared to prices in the 2nd quarter 2006.

That is until the look at the underlying data. Take the number of homes sold, in June 2007 1,366 homes were sold in Salt Lake County while June 2006 saw 1,931 sales. That’s a drop of nearly 30%.  In Utah County things are the same with 532 home sales in 2007 and 726 in 2006 (a fall of nearly 27%).

OK so maybe fewer people are listing their home and that’s why we have fewer sales? Not so there are actually more homes being listed, in Utah County for June 2007 523 homes were listed for sale and in June 2006 403. For Salt Lake County there were 1041 new listings in June 2007 and in June 2006 881.

So what does this mean? It means we are in a transitional market, going from a very strong sellers market to more of a buyers market. Homes are sitting on the market longer, inventory is increasing and sellers are having to drop their asking price.