As I told you in a previous post, each year I take a look at the real estate activity in Richmond and break down the trends by area & county or city. To see this report, click here. The report shows the real estate trends in Richmond since 2001. The report has a tremendous amount of detail in it and includes a look at the following trends:
(1) The number of new listings, as well as the # of new listings which sold. This is the first year that I looked at this figure. By looking at how many homes were listed & how many of these new listings actually sold at some point, it points out how our inventory continues to grow in the Richmond area. However, the figure for 2007 is a little distorted, since it is taking longer for homes to sell & therefore, many of the homes that came on the market in the last quarter are still showing as active.
(2) The number of closings. If you look at the trends in most of the areas, you see that after a peak in 2004 or 2005, we started seeing a decline in the number of homes which closed. Again, the number of homes listed has increased, while the number of homes closed decreased, leading to greater inventories of homes for buyers to choose from.
(3) The number of new construction homes which closed, as a % of total closings. The reason for looking at this was that I was curious to see if new construction homes were also down. As you can see, the number of new construction homes closed in 2007 was not only higher than in 2006, but it was also a higher percentage of the total closings for the year.
(4) The average sales price & average sales price/SF. For most areas, the average sales price sellers got was at last year's figure or higher. Only a few areas had a slight decrease in the average sales price. This should be looked at very generally, since this will vary greatly within the area and neighborhood. However, overall sellers do continue to get a higher price for their homes than they would have last year; however, it has taken a much longer time to get that price. Many times, sellers have had to take several price reductions in order to get their price to a level that the market was willing to buy their home at. The trade off here may be that the sellers will continue to get their higher price, but what concessions did the seller have to provide and how many additional months carrying costs did they have to pay in order to get that higher price.
(5) Days on Market. This figure did increase, in some areas, significantly. And the figures shown do not include any previous days that the home was listed. For instance, if a seller signed a listing agreement for 90 days and the home did not sell under that listing agreement, the seller may have signed a second 90 day listing agreement. During the second listing period, the home may have gone under contract in 10 days. The days on the market figure will include only the number of days during the second listing period (10 days) before the seller accepted the contract. It would not include the 90 days from the first listing period. As you can see, there is a big difference between a home that has sat only 10 days on the market before going under contract and 100 days on the market. Therefore, when looking at these figures, you need to keep this in the back of your mind. When having a market analysis done on your home, you need to make sure that your agent takes any previous listings into consideration.
(6) List Price to Sales Price %. As you can see, sellers still continue to get almost their asking price. However, another word of caution in looking at this figure. The figure does not reflect any previous price reductions. For instance, if a seller lists their home for $350,000 originally and during the time of the listing, takes a couple of price reductions to bring their list price down to $310,000 before accepting an offer of $305,000, then the sales price accepted is 98% of the list price. However, if you look at the original list price, then the offer accepted was really 88.5% of the asking price. Therefore, if you are looking at a market analysis for your home, make sure that you are looking at the pricing history of any homes which have sold or are on the market, as this is one of the reasons why homes will sit on the market for a longer period of time.
(7) Months Supply of Inventory. This is an interesting figure. What this figure says is how long it will take for the active listings that were on the market as of January 1, 2008 to sell. As you can see, the number of months it will take for all active listings on the market as of January 1 to sell has increased significantly this year. That figure assumes no new listings.
I hope that you find this report interesting. If you would like a market analysis report done for your home, please don't hesitate to call or email me. As always, I hope your 2008 has been a good one so far. And don't hesitate to email or call me if there are any questions I can answer for you.
Read the Report