Atlantic County Realestate

I read the Press of Atlantic City paper to find out an interesting article that should put smiles on everyone's faces. Ocean City realestate is similar in many aspects as Somers Point since they are neighbor cities.

Area home prices defy trend, rise 10.7%
By KEVIN POST Business Editor, 609-272-7250
Published: Thursday, February 14, 2008

Those waiting for home prices in Atlantic County to drop will have to keep waiting ... maybe a long time.
The median price of a single-family home in the metropolitan Atlantic City area - essentially the whole county - increased 10.7 percent in the fourth quarter of 2007 from the prior year, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday.

The price rise in existing homes - the second largest in the Northeast after Binghampton, N.Y. - continued and strengthened Atlantic County's trend of defying falling prices elsewhere in much of the nation. In the third quarter last year, Atlantic City-area prices had increased 6.2 percent, even as home prices nationwide fell 2 percent.

In the 150 metropolitan areas tracked by the National Realtors as a whole, home prices dropped by 5.8 percent in the fourth quarter. In the Northeast, the price decline was 4.8 percent.
The strength in the local market was no surprise to Lester Argus, president of the Atlantic City & County Board of Realtors.

"We're busy as hell right now," he said of his Argus Real Estate agency in Ventnor. "Most of the Realtors I talk to are very busy, and you see the mortgage application people with big smiles on their faces now."

The median price in the Atlantic City area - with half of houses selling for more, half for less - was $278,800 in the fourth quarter, up from $251,900 in the same period in 2006, the Realtor data showed. The fourth quarter price was also 2 percent higher than the $273,100 recorded in the third quarter of 2007.

Other areas of New Jersey covered by the Realtor survey, the largest published series of metropolitan home prices, also outperformed the nation as a whole.

Drew Fishman, current president of the New Jersey Association of Realtors and broker/sales associate with ReMax Atlantic in Northfield, pointed to home price increases in the Trenton-Ewing area (6.2 percent) and the Newark-Union area (5.3 percent) as evidence that the state home resale market is gaining strength.

"I got a call from someone this week looking for an investment property at the shore because their money wasn't working for them in the stock market," Fishman said. "If a house is priced right, with the rates as low as they are, this is the time to do it." The metro areas in the Realtor survey were about evenly divided between housing price increases and declines.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, said the continued difficulty in getting so-called jumbo loans had reduced the sale of higher-priced houses, bringing down median prices in many markets. "The healthiest housing markets today generally are moderately priced and are experiencing job growth and often population growth, which in turn is supporting strong price growth," Yun said in a statement.

The number of U.S. homes sold continued to fall. Existing homes nationwide sold in the fourth quarter at a rate of 4.96 million units per year, down 8.5 percent from the seasonally adjusted rate of 5.42 million units per year in the third quarter of 2007 and 20.9 percent lower than the 6.26-million-unit pace seen the year before.