Young blood helps stabilize housing market

By Darryl Swan

The South County Spotlight, Jul 29, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Darryl Swan / The South County Spotlight

NEW MARKET— Scott Merriman, 22, took advantage of low housing rates available through bank-owned and short-sale negotiations to land his new home on Sykes Road in St. Helens.

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An uptick in home sales nationally is not without echoes in Columbia County.

In fact, the inventory of available homes up for sale declined in June, marking the sixth consecutive month of an inventory decrease. It’s a sign to some real estate pros that a new wave of buyers is ready to enter the housing market.

The number of homes sold in June in Columbia County matched the number of home sales a year ago, a total of 44. Should that trend continue, July could be the first month to post a higher volume of home sales compared to last year.

But much has changed from a year ago.

Words such as “short sale” and “bank-owned” are commonplace when discussing today’s real estate market. And as for the buyers themselves, adjectives such as “first-time” and “young” have gone from the exception to the norm.

Take Scott Merriman, for example. Merriman, 22, has steady employment as a checkout teller at Red Apple in St. Helens.

“I moved back from Tri-City and was just living out of my parents’ house, and I was making pretty good money at my job,” Merriman said.

Together with his mom, Merriman monitored Internet real estate sites for home listings in and around St. Helens, in the process discovering that today’s home prices were within grasp.

Not necessarily through traditional listings, however.

In fact, a sampling of comparable houses in a typical St. Helens neighborhood shows that it is not unusual for bank-owned and short sale listings to be 44 percent less expensive in price than a traditionally listed home.

Merriman navigated a bank-owned sale of a house on Sykes Road. He tapped the $8,000 tax credit available through the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act and roped in a Federal Housing Administration 30-year fixed rate loan at 5 percent interest.

“I think my mom was more excited than I was, to tell the truth,” he said.

Andrew and Shayla Holmes’ story has a similar resonance.

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