As the temperatures have cooled so has activity in Summit County real estate. November sales had the poorest year over year performance of any month in 2015. Dollar volume rose a modest 5% to $109.9 million. While in absolute terms that dollar volume did beat the volumes recorded in each of the first four months, this was the first month in the year where the increase from a year ago fell into the single digits.
Transaction volume faired even worse actually declining 5% to 205 sales. That was the first negative comparison since August of 2014.
For the year to date, the numbers are still impressive. Transaction volume is up 15% to 2,261 sales while dollar volume is 27% higher than this time a year ago at $1.23 billion.
As the dichotomy in the sales numbers suggest (dollars up, transactions down), demand in the month shifted toward the higher end of the market. Properties below $500,000 saw their share of sales drop 5 percentage points to 55.9% of sales while sales in the $700,000 – $800,000 range increased their share by 4.6 percentage points to 10.1%and sales of $1-2 million increased by nearly two points to 9.5 percent.
Pricing within property types did not change materially during the month. Year-to-date the average selling price (ASP) for a single family home was $859,565 up about $2,000 from October and 9.5% ahead of the figure for all of 2014. Multi-family ASPs were just over $400,000 up 11.9% for last year. The average lot sale so far this year is $365,844 up 14.8%
Inventories have been steadily tightening in 2015 and as we enter the ski season and units are taken off the market to be rented, the issue has only gotten worse.
As of December 30, there were only 141 condos listed for sale in the county compared with 988 sales so far this year. That equates to only 1.7 months of inventory. The numbers for townhomes are even tighter with 30 active listings against 291 sales. That is about 1.2 months of inventory. Generally, the break point between a buyer’s and seller’s market is about 6 months of inventory. Clearly we are in a seller’s market for multi-family properties. Single family homes are less likely to be taken off the market for rentals so the situation is not quite as bad for them. Nevertheless, there are only 168 single family listings representing about 4 months of sales.