Home closing prices on LI fall for August

Closing prices of homes were lower on Long Island last month than for the same month a year earlier, especially in Nassau County, says Multiple Listing Service of Long Island.

But experts say there's a fluke in those numbers attributable to last year's home buyer tax credit.

In Nassau, the median closing price last month for a house, condo or co-op was $420,000, down 4.5 percent. In Suffolk, the median was three-tenths of a percent or $1,000 less than a year earlier, at $324,000, the report said.

Sales of homes on the Island last month rose from a year earlier, but there again was a fluke: sales in August a year earlier were artificially weak with the ending of the tax credit, said Manhattan-based appraiser Jonathan Miller, who tracks local sales.

"My take is that the market is stable," Miller said. "What's happening in 2011 is you're seeing the market return to a more normal level of activity -- normal for the post-credit-crunch world."

He says the tax credit, which required contracts signed by April 30, 2010, boosted sales and prices during the first half of last year, but closings fell back to more normal levels by August. Closing prices, he says, remained artificially high for a time.

Frank Dell'Accio, immediate past president of the Multiple Listing Service and broker-owner of Century 21 AA Realty in Lindenhurst and Seaford, agrees that the market is stabilizing. "I think buyers can be comfortable that what they are paying for a home today is really rock-bottom," he said.

The new report said 983 home sales closed in Suffolk in August, up 20 percent from a year earlier. In Nassau, 895 home sales closed in August, a 9.5 percent increase.

While home values were down from the same month last year, they improved from July, by a combined 1.3 percent in both counties to $364,500. It was the same in July, when values improved over June.

Median prices, which are subject to seasonal fluctuation, were up in August compared with July: 1.2 percent in Nassau at $420,000 and 2.8 percent in Suffolk at $324,000.

Buyers who closed last month include two of Dell'Accio's customers, an engaged couple, Chris Jimenez, 35, and Joyce Kouroumousis, 33, who bought a two-story, four-bedroom house in Lindenhurst after negotiating the $429,000 asking price down to $410,000.

"We were looking for almost a year for the perfect house," said Jimenez, who works for a credit card payment processing company. Kouroumousis works for Geico.

"We saw this house and that was it," Jimenez said. "Two weeks later we were in the buying process."