If the recent life and times of Oklahoma City housing could be compared to a major motion picture, it'd be "Groundhog Day,” with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell.
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We keep waking up every day and nothing's changed.
Housing inventory? Steady in March, at 5.9 months. It's been between 5.5 and 5.9 for six months.
Median home sale price? Steady, at $125,000, although the average price and total sales volume have dropped, mainly because of a big slowdown and price concessions on the highest-end homes.
Builders? Still slowing down, like they said they would.
It's still a balanced market with a slight nod to buyers.
One thing picked up in March: the speed at which the average house sold, 88 days, down almost a week from 95 days in February.
So, it's "Groundhog Day” for the most part. Not a bad movie. In most of the rest of the country, housing is caught in "The Amityville Horror” and mortgage lending is wrestling with a "Poltergeist.”
Oh, hey, let's take this movie theme to an extreme.
Remember the drive-in movie scene in "Twister”? One of the coolest shots in that flick — a tip of my Resistol, though, to the flying cows — was when the tornado tore up the movie screen. In the movie. "The Shining” was playing at the drive-in movie, in the movie "Twister.”
That's one way to think of what's going on in housing right now.
In Oklahoma, we're all at the drive-in with our kids watching, oh, I don't know, "Home Alone” or something else nice and wholesome, and the rest of the country is watching a horror triple feature, "The Haunted Mansion,” "The Money Pit” and "The Last House on the Left.”
And those dark features, which seem to never end, are bigger than our little movie and are trying to blow down our movie screen.
And now a newsreel and some commercials:
The Central Oklahoma Home Builders Association has joined the Oklahoma Association of Realtors in paying for good news. The national news is so full of gloom and doom about housing that local facts can hardly get in edgewise. So the industry itself has taken matters of fact into its own hands.
The fact is home prices rose in Oklahoma last year, overall, by more than 4 percent. It doesn't sound like much, but it's a fortune compared to cities where home values were in a free fall.
Another fact, though, is that home sales have slowed here — probably, the builders and Realtors say, because people are scared witless by those nasty national headlines.
The Realtors have committed a couple hundred thousand dollars for a statewide campaign saying "Good Thing You're in Oklahoma.” The builders dedicated $50,000 to an Oklahoma City campaign pointing out that housing here is "Defying the Trend” — it's at odds with the national situation and the national news.
Now, somebody from Purcell called me last week to say that was all bull. He said he was an appraiser for the sheriff, that foreclosures there had more than doubled since last year, and that home values are dropping.
Maybe so. But the whole point of the Realtors' and the home builders' campaigns is that real estate markets are local, local, local. You've got to look down the street and across town to find out what's going on, not the national headlines.
Maybe Purcell has hit a rough patch. But that doesn't mean Woodward has. Or Sallisaw. Or Idabel. Or Oklahoma as a whole.
Numbers lag, though. Last year was four months ago. I'm holding my breath waiting for the next set of statistics. So are a lot of people. But we should be used to it by now.
Nobody is denying that housing hasn't hit rough seas. But danged if we're going to throw life rafts out into the Oklahoma River, or the Canadian, or the Arkansas, or the Red, or the Blue, before we need them.
We'd be throwing away a lot more than a "A Fistful of Dollars,” to get back to the movies.
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