Houses Remain Unsold in Baltimore, Maryland Housing Market
Steve and Debbie Lombel put their four-bedroom Colonial in Odenton on the market in May, figuring it could take maybe four months to sell a house in the mid-$800,000 range.
“We felt pretty confident,” said Debbie Lombel. “It showed well and was a nice house on a nice lot.”
But eight months later, the now-empty house is still sitting on the market. The couple and their children have since relocated to temporary quarters in South Carolina for Steve Lombel’s job. They have borrowed from their anticipated equity and sale to build a new house.
Their agent has held 21 open houses. They’ve cut their asking price three times and now are offering to pay mortgage loan points to help a buyer get lower interest rates.
Such is life after the housing boom. Sales of homes across the Baltimore housing market plunged 19.34 percent last year from 2005, and the average price rose just 6 percent after four straight years of double-digit gains. As listings mount, an unprecedented number of unoccupied homes for sale are piling up, creating unexpected headaches for homeowners.
Some with little or no equity in their homes face a tough choice of accepting a loss or taking a risk that eventually a buyer will meet their price. Others are straining to pay two mortgages or are renting while they try to sell their old home. And some have been forced to pull their homes off the market and find tenants.
The number of vacant homes for sale nationally jumped more than 30 percent in the third quarter from a year earlier, to 1.9 million homes, the latest data available from the U.S. Census Bureau show. That’s about half of all single-family homes on the market, said Michael Carliner, vice president of economics for the National Association of Home Builders.
More than a third of those - 825,000 - are in the southern region of the United States, which includes the area in which people would seek a Maryland mortgage.
“The share of vacant for-sale is unusually high, compared to anytime in history, really,” Carliner said. “Over the past few years, total housing production has been beyond what the underlying fundamentals would indicate.”
Local real estate agents say the surge in unoccupied homes is apparent across all price brackets in the market.
“A lot of people are calling me concerned; they’re carrying two mortgages and that’s not fun,” said Frank Lanham, a Coldwell Banker real estate agent based in Fells Point. Nearly half his listings are unoccupied houses.
The pileup of vacant homes becomes a factor in market dynamics, putting more pressure on prices and, short-term, prolonging the housing slump.
“The longer homes for sale remain vacant, the more desperate on average become the sellers,” said Anirban Basu, an economist who is chairman and chief executive of Sage Policy Group Inc. in Baltimore. “The growing number of vacant homes means more sellers out there are ready to be realistic about the market to drop prices.”
Cycle of desperation
And buyers, sensing weakness, tend to pull back and wait for prices to fall more, he said:
“If buyers are waiting longer, then an increasing number of homes become vacant, which means sellers become desperate and prices fall further. That’s where we are in the cycle.”
Declining home prices could trigger more defaults on mortgage loans if homeowners struggling with two mortgages are unable to cover the cost of the loan by selling the house, said Celia Chen, director of housing economics for Moody’s Economy.com.
However, like bitter medicine, eventually it’s “a good thing,” Chen said: “It improves affordability, and in the long run, it helps prop up the housing market.”
Agents say that vacant homes for sale are often a result of job relocations that force the seller to move before the house can be sold. In some cases, sellers getting corporate relocation help are prohibited from accepting a contingent contract, which can shrink the pool of buyers.
And in other cases, buyers decide to buy before they’ve sold their house to take advantage of a deal but then have trouble selling a then-unoccupied house, agents said.
“I do have one listing now where the buyers have already purchased a home and moved into it, which is happening more often now,” said Lisa Edleman, an agent with Zip Realty. “And I’m showing buying clients more unoccupied homes as well.”
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