This winter, Ohio was gripped by subzero temperatures. There was snow on the ground in April. The weather significantly impacted home sales, real estate experts said.
“This was just a very harsh winter for home sales with the amount of precipitation we had, with the amount of days we had below zero, people weren’t out looking,” said Jeff Owens, president of Better Homes And Gardens Real Estate Big Hill, a Dayton region real estate firm with 12 offices and 260 agents.
The trend could reverse itself in coming months during the busiest time of year for home buying and selling.
Judging by clicks on Better Homes’ website in recent months, “in the second quarter, we will easily make up what we lost in the first quarter,” Owens said.
Dayton-area existing home sales year-to-date through March were 2,473 units, a 3 percent decline compared to the same period in 2013, according to Dayton Area Board of Realtors. During the same months of 2013, 2,551 single family homes and condominiums sold.
The real estate group tracks home sales in Greene, Montgomery and Preble counties and northern Warren County.
For Ohio as a whole, the number of homes sold in January-March 2014 dropped 7 percent from a year ago to 23,003, according to Ohio Association of Realtors.
While weather is seen to be the biggest factor impacting home sales, other factors at play include a low inventory of homes for sale due to weather, fewer foreclosures and still-recovering prices for some.
With fewer homes on the market, average prices held flat year-over-year in the region. The Dayton market’s average sold price for January to March was $113,544, which dropped less than 1 percent from a year ago average sold price of $114,522, according to the Dayton real estate group.
“Housing inventory is a little bit of an issue depending on where you’re looking. There are areas where you can’t find what you’re looking for,” said Bill Case, president and chief executive officer of American Mortgage Service Co., a Cincinnati-based lender with offices in Piqua and Enon.
“You do look at the numbers and I think you will see improvement in the coming months,” Case said.
Homeowners who bought their houses in the 2005 to 2006 boom years before the national housing market crashed might be holding off on a decision to sell their property until prices recover more, said Shaun Bond, director of University of Cincinnati’s Real Estate Center. Or, homeowners are waiting until they’ve found a property to buy before listing theirs for sale and are having trouble finding one.
“For whatever reason, people are holding their homes off the market,” Bond said.
Low inventory is holding the housing market back, he said. But higher average prices could push trade-up buyers in particular to act and lock in a price and interest rate before costs to buy a house rise further.
“What’s going to be important is how inventory changes when we go through the selling season,” Bond said.
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