Tony Pietro of Bath Township doesn’t need to be told that the housing market continued to improve last year.
“We sold our house in one day. We had four or five offers in the first day,” Pietro said, noting the offers were all more than the asking price for the home in Fairlawn he and his wife, Jennifer, sold to buy a bigger place in Bath.
Home sales in Summit County totaled 6,286 last year — up nearly 10 percent from 2012 and the highest annual total during the past six years, according to the Akron Cleveland Association of Realtors.
Nationally, sales reached their highest level since 2006. Sales of previously owned homes hit 5.09 million units last year. That’s up 9.1 percent from 2012.
“That’s close to normal, given the size of the U.S. population,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, in a statement. Sales peaked at 6.48 million in 2006.
Locally, prices continued to climb from the lows of the Great Recession, with the median price for sales in Summit reaching $119,000 in 2013 — up 4.1 percent from last year.
Last year’s median sales price was the highest in the past six years, though still below median prices reached in years leading up to the fall in the housing market, according to the Realtor group. (The association’s name resulted from a merger last year of the Akron and Cleveland boards of Realtors.)
Looking at a bigger area of Northeast Ohio — a 15-county region that includes Summit, Stark and Portage counties — sales of new and existing houses reached 37,176 units, up 11.8 percent from 2012 and the highest number in the past five years. This is according to the Northeast Ohio Regional Multiple Listing Service. Figures for earlier years were not available.
Area real estate agents said 2013 was a good year, though the housing market continues to recover.
“The jobs picture is still kind of sketchy,” crimping home purchases, said Jim Camp, principal broker with Cutler Realty, a dominant player in the market. “Interest rates are probably going to rise.”
Market time shorter
Pietro, who sold his house and now lives in Bath, knows his experience of selling in one day is exceptional, even in an improving housing market.
In Summit, the average time homes spent on the market totaled 106 days. That number was down from 128 days in 2012 and 134 days in 2011.
Pietro, a portfolio manager with a real estate investment company, credits the renovations he and his wife, Jennifer, did on their old Fairlawn home with making it attractive to buyers. Other factors, Pietro said, were low mortgage interest rates and the efforts of his agent, Debbie Zarconi, with the Fairlawn office of Cutler Real Estate.
Zarconi said, “In a still down time, it was a great year.” She estimated she was involved in 25 to 30 sales or purchases of homes.
Increasing rents and low mortgage interest rates encouraged many people to become first-time home buyers.
“People had been afraid to buy and they were spending a lot of money renting,” Zarconi said. “A lot of the apartment complexes took advantage of the situation and were able to increase their rents.”
Former renter Justin Snipes, 31, said he was prompted to buy, in part, by lessons he learned in a personal finance class at his church, Arlington Church of God, in Akron.
“I decided I was going to purchase instead of paying a monthly rent payment,” said Snipes, a dispatch supervisor with Dominion East Ohio. “I could pay a mortgage and get equity.”
He began looking, and “when I saw the low interest rates, I decided to get a little more serious.”
Last spring, Snipes settled on a three-bedroom, two-story residence in Tallmadge, buying from a man wanting to move to a smaller home.
“People feel safer in buying, more comfortable,” as increasing prices give people more confidence in the housing market, said Candice Eberhardt, a broker who represented Snipes on his purchase and is owner of Eberhardt Realty and Management.
‘Best year in the business’
Eberhardt, a real estate agent since 2000, said last year “was the best year I’ve had in the business.” She said most of her sales were to owner-occupants, unlike some recent years when she worked a lot with investors buying up foreclosed properties.
Tight housing inventories are likely to dampen upcoming sales.
“There are still a lot of people underwater or people feeling like they just don’t have a lot of equity and don’t want to sell,” said Camp, with Cutler Realty. “We’re concerned we’re not going to have enough houses on the market.”
Camp is anticipating fairly flat sales in 2014. He sees prices continuing to increase but doesn’t anticipate them returning to pre-recession levels anytime soon.
The good news is that tighter inventories put upward pressure on prices, noted economist Ken Mayland, head of ClearView Economics in Pepper Pike. And higher prices result in people getting out from being underwater.
This year, Mayland said, is likely to be “an even better year than 2013” for the regional market, in terms of sales and prices.
“This recovery still has some legs to go,” he said.
Statewide, sales for all of last year were up 14.7 percent to 132,566 from the year prior. Last year’s Ohio sales reached their highest mark since 2007, according to the Ohio Association of Realtors.
The average sales price for last year in Ohio was $142,004. The Ohio association reports average prices instead of median prices.
Prices took a dip in December in Summit. The median sales price for last month in the county declined to $95,000, down 13.6 percent from December 2012.
Sales momentum slowed in the county, with 453 homes changing hands in December. That’s up 2.7 percent from December 2012.
Katie Byard can be reached at 330-996-3781 or kbyard@thebeaconjournal.com.