It has come to my attention that everyone seems to want to know what their home is worth in Northwest Arkansas. While I can’t imagine why, I’ll try to accomodate. *snicker* Home prices in Benton County in particular are not as grave as they may seem. We are seeing a large number of price drops in Bentonville, Rogers, and Bella Vista because some homes have been on the market a long time.
Generally speaking, we’ve seen un uptrend in sales, showings, and offers in the last few months. We’ve also seen an uptrend in for sale by owner properties which I think can be mostly attributed to the fact that people feel they have less money to spend marketing their property. While I am not going to go into the many benefits of having a good Realtor, I will say that most of these properties end up listing anyway (something to think about if you are one of those people and don’t want to waste anymore time).
For all of Benton County there has been over 1765 sales in the past six month. I do not guarantee that accuracy about such a number because this is MLS data (which is not perfect) and there may be sales that have not been recorded here. Of those sales since February of this year, the average price is $189,430 with the average square footage being 2,023. That gives us an average price per foot of $93.63. Not too bad considering there are REO properties selling in the mid $50’s per foot. Let’s also look at the SP/LP ratio (Sale Price to List Price) and see what you can expect to get after listing your home near market value. Average list price was $196,647, average sale price was $189,430. The SP/LP ratio comes out to about 96.3%. This is expected with homes that have been on the market for a while as well as homes that are slightly overpriced.
Another encouraging sign regarding market strenth is the number of pending sales. 523 homes are pending at this time. That means a sale should occur within the next 15-60 days and that the property has entered escrow. That is about 30% of the sales for the past six months.
Average Days on Market for Benton County homes at this time is 154 for sold listings, and 146 for current listings. Speaking of homes currently for sale, there are 3,697 of them. That seems on the high side so make sure you are competitively priced when selling your home. You should also carefully consider your marketing plan with your agent to differentiate your property from all those other listings. Obviously price is a base consideration but you might consider agent incentives, web video, and viral marketing along with a serious internet presence. It’s all about getting your property exposure after all.
It seems Northwest Arkansas (and most of the rest of the world) is a little bit backwards when it comes to staying up to speed in the technological sense. I am hoping to remedy that with this weblog/site that will always be a work in progress. The Northwest Arkansas housing market has seen it’s fair share of problems lately. It’s kind of hard to keep up with everything that is going on but I am going to give it the old college try. Use the search bar, categories, or tag cloud to find out the latest happenings (hopefully not like the M. Night movie), market data, and area information focusing on Benton County in general and Bentonville, Rogers, Centerton, Lowell, and Bella Vista specifically. Along the way we’ll laugh, we’ll cry, maybe have some fun and learn something about local real estate all at the same time. Whew! What an emotional roller coaster. I anyone would like to comment on my information or make suggestions about content or the blog in general, please do so in a constructive manner. If there are any links you think we need on here or even if you would like to put a link to your business, just holler (yeah, I’ve lived in Arkansas for a while now) and I’ll see what can be done.
