The $8,000 Home-Buyer Tax Credit Has Been Extended & Expanded

Earlier today, President Obama signed new legislation extending the deadline for the home buyer tax credit into 2010 and expanding it to include current home owners who are looking to buy a primary residence.

The Basic Requirements

You qualify for the tax credit if the:

• Home you’re buying will be your primary residence
• Purchase price isn’t more than $800,000

This credit is not a loan; it’s yours, but keep in mind you have to live in your new home for three years. If you sell the home in less than three years, you’ll have to pay back the money.

What’s Changed?

With the new legislation, buyers have more time to find a home and more buyers are eligible for the tax credit:

• New deadline: To qualify, you need to be in contract with a seller by April 30th & close on the home by June 30th (The previous deadline was November 30, 2009).
• Not just for first-time buyers anymore: Home buyers who’ve owned and occupied a home for at least five consecutive years during the past eight years are eligible for a credit up to $6,500.
• Increased income limits: Individuals making less than $125,000 and couples making less than $225,000 are eligible (The limits used to be $75K & $150K).

First-time buyers are eligible for a credit up to $8,000 on homes purchased between January 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010. Qualified homeowners can a credit up to $6,500 on homes purchased between November 7, 2009 and June 30, 2010.

Bonus Link

You can check out the full text of the bill. Scroll about halfway down to sections 11 & 12:

• Sec. 11. Extension and Modification of First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit.
• Sec. 12. Provisions to Enhance the Administration of the First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit.

Redfin Partner Agents Arrive in Will County!

Great news for folks in Will County: Redfin just partnered with four local agents to help you buy or sell homes.

In areas beyond the reach of Redfin agents in the Chicago area, Redfin partners with experienced, local agents whom we have carefully chosen to uphold our standards of outstanding customer service, transparency, and better value.

Check out our service area below:

If you buy or sell a home with a Redfin partner, at closing he or she will provide you with a credit equal to 15% of the gross buyer’s-agent commission, usually worth $1,000 – $2,000. However, in Naperville, Bolingbrook and Plainfield, our local Redfin agent Patrick Lusk can help you buy or sell and offer a 50% commission refund.

Meet Our Will County Agents

We put our partner agent applicants through the ringer to ensure that you’ll get great service:

• Interviewed in-person by a Redfin market manager
• Completed at least 15 transactions in your area and 5 in the last 12 months
• Gave us email addresses to survey the clients they represented in the last 18 months
• Agreed to survey every new client and publish every review
• Paid based on customer satisfaction; removed from the program for bad reviews

	Brent Wilk Serving Will County, South Cook County Homes Closed: 250+
	Lynn Herrington Serving Will County Homes Closed: 270+
	Philip & Marjory Dore Serving Will County Homes Closed: 310+
	Dominic DiBrizzi Serving Will County Homes Closed: 40+

Apply to be a Redfin Partner

Are you a real estate agent with a commitment to customer service and transparency? We’d love to meet you. Become a Redfin partner.

The Market Wrap Up for September

Let’s take at look at some September numbers for single-family houses and condos in the Chicago area and see how they compare to last year.

Cook County

• 54,915 properties were for sale, down from 66,076 in September 2008
• 9,506 new listings came on the market, down from 11,135 in September 2008
• 3,973 properties sold, up from 3,648 in September 2008
• The average sales price for single-family homes was $250,776, down from $303,299 in September 2008

DuPage County

• 11,161 properties were for sale, down from 12,799 in September 2008
• 1,846 new listings came on the market, down from 1,998 in September 2008
• 789 properties sold, up from 739 in September 2008
• The average sales price for single-family homes was $296,595, down from $323,995 in September 2008

Lake County

• 9,728 properties were for sale, down from 10,863 in September 2008
• 1,422 new listings came on the market, down from 1,450 in September 2008
• 576 properties sold, up from 571 in September 2008
• The average sales price for single-family homes was $284,532, down from $298,166 in September 2008

We pulled these numbers from MRED.

Dig Deeper Into the Trends

These numbers are for county-level trends. To see what’s happening in your neighborhood, check out our stats & trends pages.

What trends did you see in September?

Case-Shiller: Summer Surge Benefits Low Tier Most

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). Starting this month, we will be basing all of the charts in this series of posts on the seasonally-adjusted data provided by S&P. For the full source data behind this post, plus non-seasonally adjusted and tiered price data, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website. For an explanation of how the Case-Shiller data is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – August data is released in October).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for the Chicago area* as of August:

Sixteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw an increase in their respective seasonally-adjusted HPIs between July and August. Only Cleveland, Las Vegas, Charlotte, and Seattle marked seasonally-adjusted drops month-to-month.

Here’s a look at Chicago’s latest tiered data, back through 2000:

From the looks of the Case-Shiller tiered data, I’d say that the low tier seems to be benefiting the most from the summer spike. Since April, the low tier has spiked over 7%, while the mid and high tier are up around 4% each. Given that much of the bounce has been attributed to the $8,000 tax credit available only to first-time buyers, that is not surprising.

Here’s a chart of Case-Shiller HPIs for all the markets that Redfin serves:

Here’s our peak decline chart, in which we line up the peak Case-Shiller HPI value for each of Redfin’s markets, so we can see how long each market has been declining, and how much it has dropped from the peak.

Here’s the flip side of the peak decline chart—a graph of just this year, indexed to January = 100%:

According to a Reuters story from earlier today, Robert Shiller has described the sudden spike seen in many markets this summer as potential “bubble territory.” I agree. As I have discussed on these pages in recent months, the sudden and simultaneous nature of this price uptick does not bear any marks of a return to fundamentals, but instead seems to be driven almost entirely by a mad dash for cheap loans (interest rates in the 5s) and free money ($8k tax credit).

I’m a little bit concerned that by interrupting the natural correction of the housing market, recent government intervention is setting us up for even more pain down the road. I hope I am wrong.

*[Case-Shiller defines Chicago as the entire Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL Metropolitan Division, which includes all of the following counties: Cook IL, DeKalb IL, Du Page IL, Grundy IL, Kane IL, Kendal IL, McHenry IL, and Will IL.]

Wells Fargo Tops Du Page County Lending

Mortgage Data Web sent us over some interesting numbers on lending activity in Du Page County for January 2009 through July 2009. Note that these numbers include both purchases and re-fi’s:

If you’re looking for a lender check out our recommended list of lenders.

Our Agents Are Among The Top Buyer’s Agents In Chicago

Our Chicago-area agents had another fantastic month in September!

Of the 4,400+ buyers’ agents who closed a deal in September, Mark and Greg rank in the top 1%:

When you work with Redfin, you’ll be working with some of the best agents in the region. Our agents know what’s going on in the market right now because they spend all of their time serving clients: touring homes, writing offers and closing deals.

We pulled these numbers from MRED, the database for real estate transactions and listings in Illinois, and ranked agents who represented home-buyers of single-family homes and condominiums in August based first on number of deals, then by total dollar amount.

Our Clients Love Our Service

We survey every client and track every transaction in a central customer database. For the surveys we received in September from our clients in the Chicago area:

• 21 clients responded to our customer-satisfaction survey and posted a review online, up from 16 in August.
• All 21 of those clients, or 100%, would recommend Redfin to a friend, up from 94% in August.

We ask customers to rate the likelihood that they would recommend Redfin to a friend on a 0-to-10 scale. Customers who rated 6 or higher count as people who would recommend Redfin to a friend.

Where Were the Biggest Discounts in August?

Let’s check in on our stats to find out where buyers are currently getting the biggest discounts off asking price. If you are a potential buyer, this will help you to know which neighborhoods may be softer in terms of sale price discounts off list price, and help you know where to look for potential bargains.

In the charts below, we have taken all sales data from last month in the greater Chicago area and sorted it by city.

Methodology
In order to maintain consistency with the automatically generated statistics posted to the Redfin neighborhood pages, we have slightly tweaked the way the statistics are compiled for this post series. First, we complied a list of every sale that took place in the month, calculating each sale’s sale-to-list ratio (based on the final list price). Next, we simply take an average of every individual sale’s sale-to-list ratio to calculate an entire area’s sale-to-list ratio. Any sales that came in with a sale-to-list ratio above 150% or below 50% are excluded from the calculation, and areas with fewer than twenty sales are excluded from the top and bottom ten rankings. Interested readers may download the full data summary in Excel format (xls).

Here are the top ten areas with the largest overall discount:

The overall discount rate was lower than our last update, but since we tweaked the methodology slightly, unfortunately they’re not really comparable.

Here are the ten areas with the smallest discounts:

In the 73 areas we ranked, the median discount was 5.69%.

Is the area you’re shopping not on either the top 10 or bottom 10? No problem, just download the full rankings in Excel format and hit the “FullSummary” sheet.

Of the 5,670 sales we tracked in the 1-month period, 2,886 homes sold for 5% or more off the asking price, while 327 homes sold for 5% or more above the asking price.

Case-Shiller: Simultaneous Summer Surge Stretches On

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). For the full source data behind this post, plus seasonally adjusted and tiered price data, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website. For an explanation of how the Case-Shiller data is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – July data is released in September).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for the Chicago area* as of July:

Seventeen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw an increase in their respective seasonally-adjusted HPIs between June and July. Only Las Vegas, Seattle, and Detroit continued to mark seasonally-adjusted drops month-to-month.

July saw the strongest monthly increase yet this summer in Chicago’s home price index, however the index is still below where it began the year.

Here’s a chart of Case-Shiller HPIs for all the markets that Redfin serves:

Here’s our peak decline chart, in which we line up the peak Case-Shiller HPI value for each of Redfin’s markets, so we can see how long each market has been declining, and how much it has dropped from the peak.

I suppose this summer could be called the summer of the sudden surge or the summer of the massive desperate government intervention. Either way, the result has been increasing prices in most markets over the past few months. Potentially good news if you’re trying to sell your house, but not especially encouraging if you’re hoping to buy, but prices had not yet come down quite into your reasonable range yet. Whether the $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit expires or not, I think this winter will be interesting.

Here’s the flip side of the peak decline chart, the Great Summer Bounce of Aught-Nine:

It’s the best recovery that $700 billion plus $787 billion can buy!

*[Case-Shiller defines Chicago as the entire Chicago-Naperville-Joliet, IL Metropolitan Division, which includes all of the following counties: Cook IL, DeKalb IL, Du Page IL, Grundy IL, Kane IL, Kendal IL, McHenry IL, and Will IL.]

September City/Neighborhood Price Reductions

It’s been a while since we had a look at which cities and towns have the most price reductions.

The following charts show the percent of MLS, FSBO or REO listings that were price-reduced at some point before leaving the market (either sold or removed unsold from the market) in the past 90 days. Cities/towns or neighborhoods in which the number of homes taken off the market was too small to provide believable estimates are excluded from ranking.

For those that are interested, I have uploaded the full data set in Excel format here. The downloadable Excel file also includes charts showing the top ten cities/towns/neighborhoods with the least reduced-price listings.

First up are the top ten cities with the most price-reduced listings:

Of the 125 cities/towns we ranked in the Chicago area this month, 76 had price-reduced ratios of fifty percent or more. The median price-reduced ratio was 52.0%.

Getting a little more granular, let’s look at the top ten neighborhoods for price reductions:

Of the 93 neighborhoods we ranked this month, 39 had a price-reduced ratio of fifty percent or more. The median price-reduced ratio was 48.0%.

Download the full spreadsheet to check where your neighborhood came in.

The Market Wrap-Up For August

Let’s take at look at some August numbers for single-family houses and condos in the Chicago area and see how they compare to last year.

Cook County

• 56,160 properties were for sale, down from 66,873 in August 2008
• 9,766 new listings came on the market, down from 10,896 in August 2008
• 3,991 properties sold, up from 3,972 in August 2008
• The average sales price for single-family homes was $273,479, down from $374,923 in August 2008

DuPage County

• 11,552 properties were for sale, down from 13,050 in August 2008
• 1,897 new listings came on the market, down from 1,993 in August 2008
• 803 properties sold, up from 759 in August 2008
• The average sales price for single-family homes was $378,069, down from $477,943 in August 2008

Lake County

• 9,927 properties were for sale, down from 11,190 in August 2008
• 1,408 new listings came on the market, down from 1,650 in August 2008
• 659 properties sold, up from 657 in August 2008
• The average sales price for single-family homes was $350,349, down from $432,656 in August 2008

We pulled these numbers from MRED.

Dig Deeper Into the Trends

These numbers are for county-level trends. To see what’s happening in your neighborhood, check out our stats & trends pages.

What trends did you see in August?