Gales Ferry/Ledyard Weekly Update

There are currently 128 active listings in Ledyard.  The number of active listings has remained about the same since mid July.  This week there were 7 new listings.  3 Ledyard listings were withdrawn or expired.  There were 4 pending listings and 2 closed sales.  (There were 8 price reductions.)

This week, I thought I would compare Ledyard activity with one of our neighbors.  I chose Stonington. Although larger in population, it was much closer in size than either Groton, which is much larger or Preston and North Stonington which are much smaller. This week Stonington had 16 new listings and only 2 pending sales and 2 closed sales.  Compared to Ledyard's active listing inventory of 128 listings, Stonington has 197 active listings!!!!   Stonington had 14 price reductions this week.  I did this excercise to monitor whether other towns were experiencing the same slow-down as Ledyard and it certainly appears to be the case.  

The market is changing in Eastern, CT so finding ready buyers is on the minds of most real estate agents including my own.  Only 1% of today's homebuyers purchased properties they saw in the newspaper.  25% of buyers purchased a home they saw on the internet and a whopping 77% of buyers start their home search on the internet.  It is no surprise that tech savvy agents have moved their marketing dollars away from print advertising to internet search engine placement and lead generation tools like "pay per click".  There are even some freebie websites springing up with a pretty good following like Craigslist, which now has a New London category.  So this week, in addition to the paid internet advertising we do (including pay per click) , we've started adding our listings to Craig's List.