When we evaluate a market, when we hear the stats on a market, we often hear about the positive numbers. For example, if I share that in the last 30 days, the single family home market in El Paso County is selling at 3% above last year’s number of sales and selling for just under 1.3% of the average list price at closing…those numbers sound good.
But they don’t tell the full story. And the full story is important to make good decisions.
Let’s add a little extra context.
We have as a region sold 3% more homes in the last 30 days than the same time last year. There were 546 homes sold last year in the last 30, compared to 563 this year.
Homes are selling at an average of 1.35% below list price. However, this is list price at the time of closing. This doesn’t reflect price drops. If we look at the original list price relative to the closed price, we see that homes are closing at an average of 3.8% below their original list price.
Why is this important? Sellers need to know that homes are selling for 2.5% below what the market thinks is happening. That’s $13K+ to their bottom line. Buyers need to know this, too, because it can and should impact what they are offering.
The big thing I want to highlight with this post is this: what about the homes that aren’t selling? If we are selling at 3% above what we were last year, why then are homes not seeming to sell?
Check out this graph:
What you are seeing here is almost 30 years of Decembers in the region. The blue line is the number of sales, the orange is the count of active listings and the red is the combined number of homes Withdrawn, Cancelled or Expired.
The TLDR; for this graph is this: we have more homes for sale than we’ve had since December 2013 while at the same time we are in year three of sales volume that echoes the same time and we have more homes falling off the market – not selling – than we have since 2010.
Homes ARE selling. People ARE buying. But we need to take all of these things into consideration when developing expectations of the market.