The answer is: “It’s always changing. Why do you ask?” Who can guess the question? I get that not everyone is as optimistic as I am, but I’m hearing a lot of very negative market talk out there. It’s almost as if everyone read the same dismal script one day and started repeating it. I completely understand that market activity is not the same as it was at the beginning of the year. But please, when someone asks you “How’s the market?” the only answer should be is “It’s always changing. Why do you ask?”
Inventory is rising…so what? This is something we’ve all been complaining about for like five years, and now it’s actually rising… and people are complaining about. I don’t get it. This is what this ridiculously unhealthy market needs. Megan Aller recently said “Circle back to your buyers who tapped out earlier this year, negotiating power is up.” This is true. Prices aren’t pulling away from us and now your buyers won’t have to over-pay for something they aren’t 100% happy with.
When inventory goes up, we should see days on market go up. But we aren’t. All four areas covered in this report show a decrease (!?!?) in days on market. It’s a good thing and I’m here to tell you how that happens. Simple for Longmont single-family where last year we had 37 DOM. When we eliminate the outliers – the 3 that sold at over 251 days, including one on Carolina at 532 days (not sure what was wrong with that house) – we have 28 DOM. Take out the two extremes this year and we go to 31 days… a 3 day increase…hardly worth noting and statistically insignificant even if it is 10%. We still had 17% of homes are going under contract in 7 days or less. We should see this start to creep up a bit more since all of our u/c and pending homes are at 40 DOM.
The Longmont attached home market is nearly a direct reflection of single-family market. Monthly and yearly sales are down. Days on market, when adjusted for outliers (3 over 218 days removed), would be 27 last year. There were no outliers this year so again, DOM went up just slightly. This past July 28% of attached listings went under contract in 7 days or less. This is a slight increase (better) than the 23% we saw a year ago July.
Longmont Area Real Estate Stats July 2022 (pdf)
Longmont Area Real Estate Stats July 2022 (.jpg)
The Carbon Valley should be one of those areas to excel in a higher interest rate environment. The pricing is much more affordable, averaging about $80,000 less than Longmont. You can see in their sales that 32% of them went under contract in 7 days or less and that includes a $1.2M property that went u/c in 3 days. Interestingly, the least expensive home sold last month, closed at $142k and was on the market for a whopping 26 days. Upon further review… it looks like a scrape in the Glens.
Our guest market this month is a place where, when prices started rising 10 years ago, the mantra was: drive until you qualify. That meant, if you can’t afford a home in Longmont, drive east until you find a home priced low enough you can qualify to buy it. The definition of the drive until you qualify mantra was the Johnstown/Milliken area. Look how the area has matured since then. They sell about half as many homes in a month and year as we do in Longmont. The median and average prices are on par with the Carbon Valley. They also have the same number of active listings as the Carbon Valley with 76 and 27 of those are new construction. Take your buyers there… with that much new construction listed, you’ll definitely have some negotiating power.
If you are in the camp of “the sky is falling because look, up in the sky, listings are multiplying right before our eyes!” Feast your eyes on the graph this month. It shows , gasp, listings are increasing. They are so high that we have the exact same number we had last August. Those 134 listings are only the second highest total since the 153 we had in October of 2020. The tallest blue bar on the far-left of the graph is from June of 2019 when we had 278 listings. Was anyone complaining then? Yes. We were all complaining we didn’t have enough listings. We sell about 100 single family units a month. We’d need a blue graph bar to blast through and double the height of that far left bar to get somewhere close to the 600 units we’d need to have a balanced market.
If business feels slow, consider that only 33 of the 96 listings closed last month were by Longmont agents. That is a dismal 34% capture rate. I’d say your sphere is getting poached and you may not even know it.
I’m going to leave you with one last thing. It’s that annoying commercial I get asked about all the time about title lock. Tell all your peeps not to buy it. It’s a monitoring service. If something has been recorded you get notified. At that point it’s too late. Plus, you have title insurance. Watch this news report and let Val or I know if you have any questions. And please share it with your sphere…it’ll be a good touch point. Title Lock Video
Cheers,
Kyle Snyder
720-534-8355