Chattanooga Realtors began 2015 with a modest 2.5 percent gain in home sales compared with a year ago, although pending sales in the area at the end of last month dropped by more than 28 percent from the year-ago level.
The Greater Chattanooga Association of Realtors said today that local Realtors closed sales of 458 residential units in January 2015, or eight more units than in the first month of 2014. But the number of pending sales at the end of January totaled only 341 units, or 136 less than the same period a year ago.
Nationwide, Realtors said today that January home sales were up 3.2 percent from a year ago, but much of that gain reflects the impact of the Polar Vortex that depressed sales in January 2014.
The National Association of Realtors said sales of existing homes, when seasonally adjusted, tumbled 4.9 percent last month from December's sales pace to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.82 million. That brings sales down to their lowest level since April 2014.
"The weather hit is nothing like the scale of the damage seen last winter, but we would not now be surprised to see a further decline in activity in February," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. "The underlying trend in sales is more or less flat."
In the Chattanooga market, the Greater Chattanooga Association of Realtors says in its monthly sales update that this year "will be marked by talk of changing mortgage rates and regulations," but sales and listing should continue to improve modestly.
"Early indications point to more sales, more listings, more new construction and more excitement," GCAR says. "It's not expected to be the overblown land grab of the early 2000s, but it should feel like a healthy market, which, in and of itself, may feel like an odd sensation to real estate practitioners accustomed to the boom and bust of the 21st century."
Chattanooga home prices continued to increase in the past year, rising 9.7 percent from a year ago to $152,000 in January.
The Chattanooga Realtors group also said that the number of properties being listed for sale rose 10.4 percent in the past year to 1,028 units.