JOSH BUCHANAN

January 10, 2019

December’s numbers are now in the books and another year is behind us. The year had a number of interesting things happen which I will cover in the year-in-review post in the near future. For the month of December, there were just 164 sales which is down by 41 compared to last December. There were 311 listings for the month which is down by just 13 compared to last year. The sales-to-listings ratio dropped by 10 points compared to last year from 0.63 to 0.53

Compared to the 5-year averages for the month of December, sales fell by 35 units, listings fell by 48 units and the sale-to-listings worsened by 3 points from 0.56 to 0.53. The average sales price for December 2018 was also slightly lower than the 5-year average.

For year-to-date numbers, 2018 saw 175 fewer sales than in 2017 which is a decline 5% and a drop of 1,195 units compared to the peak in 2014 which is a 26% decrease. There were 1,043 fewer listings compared to last year which is a 12% decrease and 1,878 fewer listings than the peak in 2015 which is a 19% decrease. The sales-to-listings ratio finished at 0.42 for the year, up 3 points from last year when it was 0.39. The average sales price for 2018 came in at $332,832, down by $12,000 from last year which was the biggest year-over-year decline we’ve seen in at least a few decades. Compared to the peak in 2014, the average sales price has now fallen by nearly $24,000 or 7%.

When looking at 5-year averages for YTD numbers, December’s sales fell by 654 units and listings fell by 1,076 to create a sales-to-listings ratio of 0.42 which is down just slightly from the 0.44 average for the previous 5 years. The average sales price for 2018 is down approximately $17,000 compared to the 5-year average of $350,000.

Conclusion:

December continued to show overall slowed market activity compared to last year and several years previous. In terms of sales, listings and average sales price, all three categories had the lowest numbers when looking as far back as 2013. In general, for 2018, the bad news is that the market is seeing slower activity with sales prices falling at an increasing rate. The good news is that there are also fewer listings which have prevented the market from further imbalance and actually improved the sales-to-listings ratio year-over-year. The ratio is still below 0.50 which means it’s still imbalanced, however, it is a notable improvement on last year.

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