If you ask many real estate agents in SW Florida most would tell you the 2016 wasn’t a good one this year and the numbers would bear that out. We’ve been reporting since January that sales just haven’t come in like they have in previous years as inventory grew. April housing shows some signs of improvement though as sales improved.
The numbers may look a little better simply because last years numbers have been revised down. For the past several months year over year prices have been positive because of those changes. Had it not been for those changes we could have seen some negative prices.
April Housing Shows Some Signs of Improvement
So let’s take a deeper dive into what we know. Closed sales by sale price dropped at the lower end simply because there is no inventory at the low end, so don’t read anything into that. $150-$300k is strong. Once we get over $300,000, that’s where we start to see weakening in the market. It’s been this way all year.
Let’s look at inventory by current list price. Here we start to see inventory rising at anything over $150,000. We’ll keep our eyes on those numbers. $200k especially jumped out at us, although as agents we’re glad because it’s been hard to find any inventory in that range to show buyers.
When we look at overall listing inventory we see it’s risen year over year every month since January. New pending sales dropped 7.3% in April, so overall listing inventory could continue to rise in coming months. We’ll continue to track those numbers as well.
New listings were up 2.9% in April. When we see listings rising and pending sales falling, we can reasonably assume inventory may rise a bit in coming months.
As bad as all this sounds, April was an improvement in some areas over what we were seeing in February and March. We predicted a market shift months ago and I think the numbers show that. We’re not rocket scientists. We just study the numbers. Many times the future isn’t hard to predict if you study where the tracks are headed.
If you’re a seller or need to sell in the next few months, you need to know these numbers. In fact, I’m going to be starting up a Seller’s Club whereby we’ll produce a monthly video each month going over the numbers in detail. We don’t have room to show all the graphs here so we spread them out over the month, but in that video we could show them all as they are hot off the press.
E-Mail us at Brett@topagent.com if you’re considering selling and would like to be included in the seller’s club monthly video update.
Lastly, we haven’t covered the distressed market in awhile. That’s because there isn’t much of a distressed market anymore. We continue to get calls from buyers looking for foreclosures and short sales. This past week we received two calls in about 30 minutes, and when we tell them there aren’t many, they are bewildered.
As you can see, there were only 9 single family short sales in the county, and only 55 foreclosures. That’s indicative of a fairly healthy market. Oh the market has shifted from a seller’s market, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a healthy market.
The market rarely stands still. It can shift like sand at the sea and it can be balanced and healthy or sick. Right now we have a pretty healthy market. If you’re a buyer or seller, it pays to know the hot spots and weaker spots.
You can search the MLS and do market research for Free at www.LeeCountyOnline.com or call us at 239-489-4042
Good luck and Happy Selling!
