Market Update - May 2019
May Market Update
Happy June everyone! The official start to Summer. Long Days. 100+ degree weather. While the weather was unusually mild in May, the Real Estate Market sure was not. With another strong month in the books, we are heading into the Summer selling season with plenty of momentum. Let’s get into the numbers for May.
As always, this information is for Single Family Homes only!
Sales Price
For the 3rd month in a row, the Median Sales Price ended at $300,000. We’ve now been in a $12,000 range for the last 13 months. This stability has not been seen for several years, providing proof and value that the home prices appear to be in a range of affordability and equitable for buyers and sellers.
The average sales price had a nice jump in May, from $344,500 up to $358,500. At $358,500, we have not had a month with a higher AVERAGE sales price since November of 2007! Remember, the Average price tends to fluctuate more than the Median, so jumps like this are not overly indicative of the market and its strength.
New Listings
We saw 4703 NEW listings hit the market in May, again, a multi year record for any specific month. We have to go back to 2011 to have anything close to this level. This trend has not changed for the last few years; we are seeing more inventory hit and maintain in the market. If you are considering a purchase, you have more homes to consider than you have had in years. This is helping reduce the amount of multiple offers on properties, providing some much needed power to Buyers. However, the market is still really strong for sellers too, as this inventory is still being consumed through a high rate of sales.
Inventory
As stated above, we have more and more homes hitting the market every month, but we are seeing those homes sell quickly. The inventory level (the number of homes available for sale at the end of the month) has remained consistent during the first few months of the year, and has actually dipped a bit the last 2 months. We still have about 47% more inventory than we did this time last year, but the level of inventory has remained in a constant range the last 8 months or so.
Our inventory levels equate to about 3.3 months of inventory. We have been between 3.0 and 3.4 months of inventory for the last 8 months, once again maintaining a stabilizing market, which is beneficial for Buyers as well as Sellers.
Days on Market
The Median Days on Market for May did not change from April; it’s currently at 25 days, or under a month. This is down 8 days from the beginning of the year, which is showing the market is adjusting to the increased inventory, and starting to swallow up houses quicker. The average Days on Market for May was 45 Days, down just one day from April. If you think about this, and the fact that we had over 3200 single family homes sold overall in May, for the Average to take just about 6.5 weeks, that’s pretty impressive. Last Summer the Average was 27 days, which had not been that low in over 13 years of data that I was able to pull.
I will say this; 2018 appears to be the outlier year, not the normal year. Anyone that compares last summer’s market to this summer’s is not really giving a fair comparison. I would liken our 2019 market to a much more ‘normal’ market. We are seeing increased competition, and increased market timing. However prices have continued to rise from where they were even last year. I keep referring to June / July of 2018. To give you an idea of the market difference, July 2018 had a median sales price of $290,000. So as hot as that market was, overall, our prices have come up 3.5% since July of last year. Anyone who is banking on double digit increases has missed the boat. We are in a new, normal, horizontal moving market, which at least, in my opinion, is a market we want to be in.
-GZ