Regional Spotlight: Wichita Housing Bucks National Trends

RISMEDIA, August 22, 2007—(MCT)—Subprime mortgage collapse! Falling home sales! Tumbling home prices! That’s nothing. Here’s a shocking headline: “Wichita remains a seller’s market.”

That’s the case, say several local real estate professionals and experts, because the inventory of local homes continues to decline and the time homes are listed before selling is steady, despite scores of new homes coming on the market every month.

“Demand is the same while inventory is down a little bit,” Mike Grbic, a Realtor with Coldwell Banker, said Monday.

Neither sellers nor buyers realize Wichita is a seller’s market because of the barrage of bad news nationally, said Stan Longhofer, director of the Center for Real Estate at Wichita State University.

“Buyers aren’t acting with a degree of urgency, and sellers aren’t willing to reject the first offer they get,” he said.

Home sales for the Wichita area through July are down 2.2% — about 150 homes — from 2006, according to the Wichita Area Association of Realtors. But sales remain ahead of 2005, the previous record year.

“People don’t need to pay attention to what they hear about a down market; that’s the East and West Coast,” said Tim Holt, broker for Realty Executives of Wichita. “Wichita is a pocket of prosperity.”

And that’s despite the cold winter and wet spring that discouraged house shopping and home building.

“If we look at it from a weather-adjusted basis, we’re doing very well,” Longhofer said.
Longhofer offers this bit of advice for sellers, though: Buyers want homes ready to move into, not fixer uppers.

But Longhofer added that the national turmoil in the housing and mortgage markets may cause at least one change locally: the disappearance of subprime and other unconventional loans.

That could mean fewer people are able to buy homes.

Mitch Crouch, president of Mortgage Centre, a division of Equity Bank, agrees that subprime loans have virtually disappeared over the last month.

But he expects that some nontraditional loans, such as 100% loans — ones that require no money down — will continue for those who are good risks.

There will even be loans for those who may not qualify for a conforming loan, such as those who don’t want to document their income, Crouch said.