It’s just past the middle of the month and you know what that means – it’s Home Sales Report time!

March is typically the height of the Spring selling season, but as you’ll see, things were still down quite a bit from this time last year. Bummer.

However, good news may be on the horizon: I’m hearing a lot of buzz from agents all over town that business is starting to pick up and I, for one, am absolutely slammed working with first time home buyers who are taking advantage of the $8,000 tax credit and killer rates. And I know that showings of listings at my office are way up from last month and we already have more pending sales for this month than the last.

And while that may not be hard evidence of a market turnaround, after months and months of hearing nothing but moaning and wailing from agents, I’ll take any positivity about the Knoxville real estate market that I can get.   We’ll just have to wait until this time next month to see if there’s possibly a light at the end of this housing slump tunnel.

But that will be then and this is still now, so, without further ado, allow me to break down the March home sale numbers the only way I know how, AAKT style. Enjoy!

Let’s start with just a little bit of good  news -

Average sales price for 2 or less BR homes is up.
Mar ‘08 – $84,600
Mar ‘09 – $92,100

And one day – hopefully not to long from now – we’ll have more good news than that, but for now let’s look at the not-so-good news -

Median sales price for 2 or less BR homes is (slightly) down.
Mar ‘08 – $70,000
Mar ‘09 – $69,000

Average sales price for 3 BR homes is (way) down.
Mar ‘08 – $158,800
Mar ‘09 – $145,400

Median sales price for 3 BR homes is down.
Mar ‘08 – $143,000
Mar ‘09 – $134,000

Conventional loans were once again way down…
Mar ‘08 – 692
Mar ‘09 – 346