Santa Fe Market Conditions

Most of our recent inquiries center around the state of the Santa Fe real estate market. Santa Fe is a turndown like the rest of the country but no where near as bad as places like Arizona, California or Florida. In fact through the 4 th qtr of 2007, our median price has continued to rise. I have to say this is a statistical aberration though. The high end of our market over $1,000,000 has remained strong whereas the lower end, under 400,000 has softened and is definitely a "buyers market". The middle range has also softened a little and could be seen a slight buyers market.

Sales volume in terms of number of units is off about 30% from the high of 2004-2005. Inventories are up so there are lots of nice homes available.

As a buyers broker in this type of market it is easy to work 2 or 3 offers on similar homes to get the best purchase price. To give you an example, we were able to recently complete a contract for $343,000 that was priced at 385,000.

In general we are not experiencing the mortgage foreclosure problems of other states. Throughout the big real estate boom our mortgage people played it very straight and New Mexico is proud to have one of the lowest foreclosure rates in the country. As a result we don't have the great foreclosure deal like Arizona or Florida. Our drop in prices is really a result of lack of buyers, tightening of mortgage qualifications and overblown lower end prices.

If your interested I would be happy to send you listings from our MLS to give you an idea what is available.