Tennessee real estate market

The Tennessee real estate market continues to face mixed signals during the month of April, as two of the largest urban centers in the state have received conflicting evidence from different real estate indicators. According to an April 26, 2010 article in the Nashville Business Journal, “Home prices experienced their first annual increase in more [than] three years in February – but the good fortune was not shared in the Nashville area, according to data released today by First American CoreLogic. In the Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin area, home prices in February declined 3.97 percent, including distressed sales, a slight improvement over the 4.21 percent decline witnessed in January, according to FACL.” The piece, composed by Eric Snyder, continued to say that “Excluding distressed sales, prices declined 1.57 percent in February, compared to a 2.46 percent decline in January. First American CoreLogic is projecting that Nashville-area home prices, including distressed sales, will drop 1.26 percent over the next 12 months.”

Better news for Tennessee homes for sale was reported by an April 29, 2010 article in the Memphis Business Journal, which found that “Foreclosures on residential properties in the first quarter for the Memphis metropolitan area fell 19 percent compared to a year ago, according to RealtyTrac Inc.’s Q1 2010 Metropolitan Foreclosure Market Report. The year-over-year drop was in line with many other major metro areas.” The piece continued to state that “Compared to the fourth quarter of 2009, the number of foreclosures fell 8 percent. For the three years end[ing] March 31 there were 3,749 properties with a foreclosure filing in the eight-county metropolitan area. That was one filing – either a default, notice of trustee sale or notice of foreclosure sale – for every 148 housing units in the area.”

Still, remaining foreclosures have deflated the values of some Tennessee real estate, according to an April 9, 2010 article in The Commercial Appeal, which found that “House values fell more in the Memphis area than in other large city in the nation December through March, according to a company that provides data for real estate valuation…Forty-three percent of sales in the eight-county Memphis metropolitan area involved lender-owned houses.”