More Homes Within Reach of First Time Buyers

By Jamie Smith Hopkins

If you wanted to buy a home for less than $250,000 three years ago, three-quarters of the market in the Baltimore metro area was out of your price range.

Then sellers got walloped. Housing slump. Mortgage meltdown. Recession.

Now you under-$250,000 buyers - classic first-time home purchasers - have a lot more to choose from.

Properties with asking prices in that range made up 43 percent of the metro area's housing market in May, up from 24 percent in May 2006. More under-$250,000 homes were for sale at the end of May - 8,149 - than in any previous May since 2001, according to a Baltimore Sun analysis of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems data.

"It's really opened up," said Bob Lucido, president of the Bob Lucido Team with ReMax Advantage Realty in Howard County. In some cases, "first-time buyers are able to get single-family homes as their first home because prices have come down."

Better affordability is good news not only for buyers but the housing market, which has suffered from a domino effect after Baltimore metro area prices practically doubled earlier in the decade. When first-timers can't buy, people in starter homes can't sell - which means they can't buy bigger homes, and the owners of those homes can't buy anything else either. Sales have plummeted in the metro area since the end of 2005. Thousands of homes have simply been sitting on the market.

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