For years, Lancaster County prided itself on being largely immune to the vicissitudes of the national housing market.
Not anymore.
As home sales across the country plummet because of economic woes and fallout from the subprime crisis, including tighter lending standards, they're nose-diving locally, too.
The number of houses sold in Lancaster County dropped an astounding 29.5 percent during the first quarter of 2008, compared with the same period in 2007.
Local agents attribute the steep decline to a combination of economic uncertainty, buyer caution and increased difficulty in acquiring mortgages, similar to what's happening nationally.
Jeff Funk, president of the Lancaster County Association of Realtors, said negative media coverage about the problems in the mortgage market and the state of the economy also affect consumers psychologically.
"They're sitting on the sidelines waiting to see if the worst is over," he said.
"It's a little bit tougher for buyers to get a mortgage" since lending criteria have gotten stricter, said Dawn Brill-Cooper, an agent with Prudential Homesale Services Group.
"And they're a little worried about the economy," she said.
Consumer confidence nationwide dropped to a 26-year low in April, as the University of Michigan preliminary index of consumer sentiment fell to 63.2.
Nationally, the real estate market has been sinking into the worst housing recession since 1989-1991.
The National Association of Realtors reported this month that sales of existing homes fell 23.8 percent nationwide from February 2007 to February 2008. Pending sales of existing homes in the Northeast dropped 25 percent during the same period.
For new homes, the Realtors group projects sales to fall 25.7 percent this year compared with 2007.
The group's top economist didn't sway from his prediction that the housing market would pick up in the second half of the year, but others in the industry don't expect improvement until 2009.
Locally, the average sale price dropped 2.4 percent from the first quarter of 2007 to the first quarter of 2008. Funk attributed that decline — from $185,767 to $181,322 — to fewer high-end homes selling.
Brill-Cooper has been in the real estate business long enough to remember the pace of the market before the off-the-charts activity of the past several years. So to her, what's happening now is sort of a return to normalcy, she said.
Part of the problem is, some sellers "still have the mentality the market is like it was two years ago," Brill-Cooper said, and they expect to see the kind of price for their house their neighbors got when homes were selling fast and furious.
"It will take three or four months to sell a house now," which is a more typical time frame, she said.
"It won't take two weeks," Brill-Cooper said. "Sellers need to be realistic."
Paula Wolf is a staff writer for the Sunday News. She can be reached by e-mail at pwolf@lnpnews.com.
