Less Than 1 Month of Inventory
I received the 7 county MLS report from SMDRA for March and here are the highlights. First and foremost the average price of a detached home exceeded $500k for the first time ever! Second, the sale to list price ratio hit 100.7% last month, the highest ever for March!
Buyers purchased 4,203 homes last month, down 8.3% from a year ago.
Sellers listed 5,926 new homes last month, down 6% from a year ago.
Buyers placed under contract 5,373 homes last month, up 5.9% from a year ago.
It’s not a good sign for inventory levels when under contracts are increasing and new listings are dropping.
The average price of a detached home was $513,810, which is a 10.2% increase from last March.
The average price of an attached home was $341,699, an increase of 8.7% from last March.
The median price of a detached home was $439k, an increase of 8.4% from a year ago.
The median price of an attached home was $291,500, an increase of 12.1 from a year ago.
It fascinates me that the average price of a detached home is rising faster than the median price is. Whereas, the opposite happened with attached homes.
Median CDOM was just 5 days, the lowest ever for March.
We ended March with just 3,955 homes for sale.
This puts months of inventory at 0.94 months.
New listings in March < $500k—3,894 homes (65% of our new listings)
Sales in March < $500k—2,956 homes 70% of our sales)
We saw large increases in Average CDOM for homes sold in the $500k’s—a 50% increase from last March to 99 days
We also saw large increases in Average CDOM for homes sold in the $600k’s—a 41% increase from a year ago to 96 days.
But, the increase in Average CDOM for homes in the $700k’s was just 9.5% from last year. and the increase for homes in the $800k’s was 12.6%.
However, the Median CDOM ranged from 10 days for homes in the $500k’s, 14 days for homes in the $600k’s, 13 days for homes in the $700’s, and just 8 days for homes in the $800k’s.
Year to date new listings total 14,214, nearly the same as last year..
Year to date sales total 10,160, down 5.7% from last year.
Year to date 16.2% of our homes have sold to cash buyers. Another 66.9% have sold to conventional loan borrower. That’s a total of 83% of our homes sold to people with money and great credit. There will be very few distressed sales in the future with numbers like this.