The welcome mat is out again.
Sure, it may be a little mud-stained and tattered by the economic crisis that trampled the real estate market in the past few years. But people are slowly stepping back into the housing game.
So this year's Rating the Suburbs issue is here to help. We've explored what's selling now and what's important to Clevelanders when they're searching for a new place to live.
"There are 27 percent fewer houses on the market than there were this time last year," says Howard W. "Hoby" Hanna IV, president of Howard Hanna Ohio. That figure and the influx of homes purchased last year with the government's first-time buyer tax credit may be reasons why Ohio's year-to-year overall sales are down 5.2 percent.
For some, that remains discouraging. "If you have to sell, chances are, you're not going to get what you thought you were going to get three or four years ago," says Tom Bier, senior fellow at Cleveland State University's Levin College of Urban Affairs. "It might be a tough pill to swallow."
Even in a tough market, Hanna says, people are on the move. "It's the perfect storm to buy. There's never been interest rates this low," he says.
No matter what type of house you want, there's one out there for you. It just takes some looking. The homeowners on the following pages viewed several homes to find the one they wanted to call home. And it wasn't all curb appeal.
"What people are buying right now are neighborhoods as much as they are the house," says Hanna. He cites traditional suburbs such as Chagrin Falls (#14 on this year's Rating the Suburbs list), Shaker Heights, Westlake (#7), Rocky River (#8), Bay Village (#9) and Brecksville (#17), which have good school systems and are a little bit closer to downtown, as being strong areas for sales.
In that case, we'd also recommend schools-strong Solon (#1 in our education rankings), Orange Village (#5) or Beachwood (#6).
"The odds are pretty good that if someone buys today, they are not going to move for eight to 10 years," Bier says. "The longer you're going to stay in your house, the better your financial situation is likely to be."
