The information below was provided by Bryan Scoresby at Countrywide in Wasilla

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?Loan Type????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????? 30 year?????????????? 15 year

Bryan Scoresby
Home Loan Consultant
1981 East Palmer Wasilla Hwy. Ste. 200
Wasilla, AK 99654
(907) 352-4504 direct
(907) 357-5866 fax?????? Email Bryan

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• Neal Fried was in Wasilla today giving a great presentation regarding the Mat-Su economy to the Valley Board of Realtors. Neal is an economist for the State of Alaska. He has a talent for making statistics seem interesting.   He is excited about research.  I was excited about his statistics. All the charts are courtesy of Neal Fried, click on them to enlarge.

Here are some of the highlights:

1. The population in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough continues to grow even though other population areas are shrinking.  The chart to the top left illustrates that.  The valley continues to show healthy growth even though Anchorage actually experienced negative growth.  The state as a whole also saw negative growth as the yellow column shows.
2. Job growth in 2006 was slower, but still healthy.  The four years previous to 2006 showed job growth of over 1,000 new jobs per year but 2006 saw only 646 new jobs.  Fried’s guess is that 2007 will be similar to this year in job growth.
3. Housing affordability has decreased. This has been the case nationwide.  Prices of homes have increased to the point that it now takes 1.9 workers at an average Valley income to afford the average home in the valley.  However, since Anchorage wages are higher it only takes 1.4 Anchorage workers to afford that same home.  That is the reason we have so many Anchorage workers living here.  In fact, 35% of our work force commutes to Anchorage.  In addition, another 10% work elsewhere in the state. 

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It’s not much of a photo, but after lots of tries I actually caught one burst of the modest fireworks displays I observed last night.  It’s a new year…welcomed in today with more snow.  I was up on Lazy Mountain where it looks like they got about twice as much snow as my area near Trunk Road.

In addition to the above snapshot, I thought I’d take a snapshot of the real estate market to see if it can tell us anything.  I took a look at November of 2006 compared to November of 2005 See Market News for more about real estate trends.   This is a comprehensive search of the Valley MLS system which includes data not only in Wasilla and Palmer but from Talkeetna and Trapper Creek to Sheep Mountain. 

November of 2005 showed 265 closed residential sales at a median price of $208,000 which were on the market for 51 days.  November 2006 showed 188 sales at a median price of $216,833 that spent 66 days on the market. 

What does this mean to you?  While we could use a lot more info to get the whole picture, it does seem to show that our red hot market has cooled a little.  Prices are still up but sales are slightly down at the end of the year. However, when we look at the market news for all of 2006 we don’t see much of a drop in sales. 

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In a market with ten months or more of inventory it is extremely important to correctly price your home.  If it is even slightly overpriced it will most likely prevent it from selling.  Remember, ten months worth of inventory doesn’t mean that your home will sell in ten months.  It’s not like we will run out of inventory in ten months so that your home will sell because it is the last one on the market. 

What happens is that homes are always entering and leaving the market.  The homes that are priced to sell move fairly quickly and are replaced by others.  The overpriced houses can sit on the shelf forever without a sale.  In Wasilla and Palmer, (not the whole core area), the median sales price for the 1,005 homes sold in 2006 was $225,000.  The median asking price currently is $259,950.  Any home that is priced $35,000 too high is going to be on the market for a long time.  In fact, if a house with a market value of $225,000 is actually put on the market at that price, it will likely sell in 60 days or less.  However if the same house is marketed at $260,000, it will likely take a year or more to sell it if the owner doesn’t lower the price. 

Five common methods to determine the price.

1. Some people choose the price of their home based on the amount of money they want to walk away with.  To them, it doesn’t matter how much the house is worth, they need a certain amount in their pocket and that is how they determine the price.

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