Home Prices Decline; with No End in Sight

Those of us who live in this city tend not to check out the value of our homes anymore at websites like Zillow.

Those who are brave enough to do so always report back that the situation is very bad, which it is, and that it might get worse, and that all of us are going to be in the same homes for quite sometime before there is a turnaround – which is altogether most likely.

Since 2008 and even a bit before that, home prices have been sliding downward, plunging, actually.

In Lynn the situation is such that most better homes have slipped downward in value by the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Some homes in the Diamond District, for instance, have gone from $800,000 to $500,000 while on Lynnfield Street or in Pine Hill or in East Lynn, single family homes and multi-family homes have declined dramatically in price going from $400,000 to $250,000 and from $250,000 to $200,000 and on and on and on.

In nearly every case, lower assessments didn’t cause a home sale at a much higher price to be accomplished.

Not any more.

Your home will sell today at a price much closer to its assessed valuation than in years past because of the changes in the real estate marketplace.

The end is not yet in sight for the downward plunge in real estate values in this city.

Lynn is one of those places where property values climb more slowly when the trend is upward and which fall more rapidly when the market turns the other way.

The situation really isn’t so different in Swampscott and Marblehead, whose only advantage over us is that the public schools there have better students and higher scores which leads to more expensive housing.

Even in those two toni towns prices are significantly down for real estate or are being dropped. Some properties have been on the market for longer than a year.

We appear to be facing a long period with literally no speculation in the marketplace – and without speculation – the price for real estate won’t move upward and in fact, will move the other way.

Experts claim the economy is improving but you’d never know it by looking at the local real estate marketplace.

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