Knoxville Tennessee Real Estate Blog

Tennessee is a state with lots of scenic beauty and lots of outdoor recreational activities.

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) has created an awesome lake and river system for boaters, fishermen, and all sort of water sports. East Tennessee, the part I live in, is home to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with over 900 miles of hiking trails, campgrounds, and beautiful mountain scenery.

Another little known and used part of Tennessee outdoors is the huge amount of state park, scenic areas, and protected natural areas dotted all over.

I visited one I had never been to today; Stinging Fork Falls Natural Area near Spring City which is about 50 miles south of Knoxville.

Stinging Fork Creek cascades over rock formations.

This is a great place to visit if you want to get away from crowds and most everything else. We were there about 2 hours and did not see a single other person; just the sounds of birds, the wind, and the rushing water. When is the last time you have been outside your house and not seen another person for 2 hours?

If you love year round out door activities as much as I do, then maybe you need to come visit us in East Tennessee. We have plenty to do for all interests and all seasons.

You might even like it enough to want to move here permenently. Check our areas housing out here: www.KnoxvilleHomeCenter.com

Here’s the latest report from the Knox County, Tennessee Register of Deeds real estate transactions.

There were 157 transactions during the past week; that’s about on par for the 150 average we’ve had for 2009.

And as usual the $100,000 to $150,000 price points dominate the number with almost twice as many as any other category.

Even though we have not seen the normal seasonal slowdown yet, I think it may be beginning in December.

Real estate in Knox County and most everywhere else in the United States is in a very highly volatile state right now because of the economy, unemployment, and a lack of consumer confidence. I believe that will be exacerbated this month by the Christmas season. People with holiday parties and shopping foremost in their minds are typically not in the house buying mode at the same time.

According to the Knoxville Realtors Multiple Listing Service there are 3,727 active residential listings and 976 condos in all price points. Here’s a graph showing the current, active listings broken down by price points.

By comparing the two graphs you can easily see there’s a huge disparity between the number of current, active listings and those that actually sell.

This also demonstrates that now is an excellent time to buy a house or condo. Excellent fiancing is still available and there is a huge selection of homes for sale. Visit www.KnoxvilleHomeCenter.com to see all the current active listings listed above plus all the other counties served by the Knoxville Area Association of Realtors

I’m back in Knoxville after attending the annual National Association of Realtors (NAR) Conference and Expo in San Diego, California.

View of the San Diego skyline from Coronado Island

One of the most exciting things I saw at the conference was the official unveiling of NAR’s new consumer website, HouseLogic.

HouseLogic is not a listings website like Realtor.com but rather a consumer resource which NAR intends to make the ‘go to’ site for homeowners and buyers to visit for objective and valuable advice, tips, and pretty much everything you need to know about owning and buying real estate.

You can simply visit the site and search to find whatever you’re looking for; it’s laid out very well and easy to navigate. A second option is to sign up for a free account and be able to find more easily projects and tips customized to your area. You’re completely safe signing up with your email address; the site’s privacy statement assures that none of your contact information will ever be passed on to anyone for any reason without your express consent.

I signed up for a free account and was immediately served up some project ideas to save money on energy costs, preventative maintenance on my heating system, and an article on how to receive up to $1,500 in tax credits for replacing an existing heating and air conditioning system. Pretty good stuff and the price was definitely right, FREE.

For buyers NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun had some words about the current market. He said: “said home sales continue to be dominated by lower-priced homes. In fact, NAR data shows nearly 70% of homes sold in September were priced below $250,000.

“The housing market has become much more active at the lower end,” said Yun. “The $8,000 homebuyer tax credit has significantly helped the market and is having its intended impact of stimulating home sales, decreasing high home inventory levels, and helping to stabilize home prices.”

Sales of homes priced below $100,000 are up 22.5% from a year ago. Sales in the upper-end market are still slow, however; homes priced above $500,000 are up only 4% from last year.

Yun projects the homebuyer tax credit will help raise home sales this year by 350,000 to 400,000 among first-time homebuyers—these are buyers who couldn’t have purchased a home without the tax incentive.

“The expansion of the tax credit into 2010 will help raise existing-home sales next year by as much as 15% and increase home prices by 3 to 5%,” he said.

Increased affordability is also helping spur lower end home sales. In September, the national median existing home price was $174,900, down 8.5% from one year ago.

So do yourself a favor, pay a visit to HouseLogic and see what it has to offer you. Better yet sign up for a free account and let the site find things relevant to your needs and get a monthly newsletter (optional) filled with timely information.

Buyers and sellers are also invited to visit KnoxvilleHomeCenter.com to see all the Knoxville area homes for sale as well as find buying and selling tips, schools information, local jobs, recreational opportunities, and lots more Knoxville information.

Please feel free to comment or ask a question either here or email me

By now lots of us have likely heard something about www.Wordle.net, the website that lets you build a “word cloud” like the one below which is made of words used in a post. The most used words appear larger and seldom used words appear as smaller.

While that is a very cool application to add some color and visual interest to a post, there may be occasions where you want words other than the most used ones to appear larger and more prominent.

There’s a very easy way to make that happen by simply ‘cheating’ when you paste your word cloud in to Wordle to transform it. In this example I’m deliberately only using the words “Knoxville Real Estate” and “Jim Lee, Realtor” one time to illustrate my point.

Here’s the normal Wordle with all the words in this post as you see it.

Now let’s suppose for whatever reason you want the keywords I mentioned above to appear more prominently in your word cloud.

Simply by adding them multiple times ( I added each one 6 times) you can dramatically alter the output of your Wordle world cloud should you have a reason to want to.

Here’s the same word cloud as above with the added keywords mentioned above.

And to capture the above Wordle files I used MWSnap, a free screen capture utility that has a lot more functionality than simply using the print screen key on your keyboard and it’s my favorite price, FREE!

BTW, even though MWSnap is freeware someone had to work to develop it. I made a contribution to that person from the site I downloaded it from.

Happy cheating.

PS, I saved the above images as .JPG files which also gives you the option to insert (slip) your own keywords in the image description and title when you insert the file into your post.

Below is a chart prepared by the National Association of REALTORS ® comparing the new changes to the Homebuyer Tax Credit.

The biggest change is that current Homeowners are now eligible if they sell their current homes and then buy AFTER the date of enactment of this extension which is November 6th, 2009.

Because of widespread incidents of fraud, purchasers must now attach documentation proving they actually bought a qualifying home to qualify for the credit.

Additinally the income guidelines have been increased, now a single taxpayer can qualify if they earn up to $125,000 and up to $225,000 for married taxpayers.

The rationale for increasing the income limits and expanding the credit to existing homeowner is that it should encourage more higher priced home purchases. Currently the existing tax credit was driving mostly lower end purchases.

All of us have probably at one time or another watched one of those TV game shows that feature a “Lightning Round” of fast paced questions.

I applied that concept to selling your Knoxville area house with a 90 second “Lightning Round” of tips to make it more appealing to potential buyers and bring a higher price.

Read more great “Lighting Round” home selling tips at Knoxville, Tennesse Real Estate Blog.

The graph below compares this year’s 3rd quarter (July, August, & September) sales figures with past years. There’s no denying the volume is still sliding although it does show some signs of leveling off a bit.

Typically at this time of year we’re started a season decline which continues into early the following year and then starts a climb back to the traditional peak summer selling season. This year the sales seems to be holdin up longer than usualy according to the graph below which compares 2009 year to date sales with previous years.

As you can see by the red line representing Knoxville sales so far in 2009, the numbers of sales seems to be holding up longer than as in past years. I believe a significant number of those sales are being driven by the $8,000 tax credit that expires at the end of November. It will be interesting to see what happens to the numbers at that time.

We’ve talked a lot about sales numbers but how are prices holding up in this depressed market? Fairly well actually. We haven’t seen any really depressed prices compared to some of the harder hit markets like south Florida, California, Michigan, and others. I believe home values have fallen some in the great Knoxville area but not dramatically.

In the Knoxville, Tennessee real estate market a typical sale is a 3 bedroom, 2 bath homes with a two car garage and somewhere between 1500 to 2200 square feet. Here’s how the median prices of those types of homes have fared over the past 10 years.

The median price is simply the price at which half of the homes sold are more expensive and the other half are less expensive, fewer sales of cheaper homes moves the median higher, all else being equal. Since our median price is down to $139,900 in the 3rd quarter of 2009 versus a high of $154,500 in the third quarter of 2007 that means we’re selling more less expensive houses than higher priced ones.

Those statistics are born out by the absorption rates (time to sell) of Knoxville area homes. Today there is a 42 months supply of Knoxville homes priced over one million dollars and only a 9 months supply of those homes priced between $100,000 to $150,000.

Bottom line any way you slice and dice it: Knoxville TN home sales are down compared to the booming market of just a couple of year ago and as long as mortgages continue to be difficult to obtain and unemployment continues to be in the 10% range I don’t see many reasons for our market to improve significantly.

On the brighter side there will continue to be homes bought and sold every day, just fewer of them and probably not for top prices as before.

If you have a house for sale in the Knoxville, Tennessee area right now and it’s been on the market over 30 days here’s some tips you can probably use. More useful home selling tips at www.KnoxvilleHomeCenter.com including a free copy of my 52 page eBook titled: “450 Ways To Make Your Home Sell Faster”.

Looking to buy a house in the greater Knoxville area? www.HomeCenter.com is also a great place to see all the homes, condos, land, and lots of sale. No registration required, just plug in your search criteria and start looking. Search by Maps, addresses, and areas.