All Star Break Means halfway through the year for Real Estate

It's baseball's All Star Break and that also means its the half way point for the calendar year and a great time to see how the 2011 Housing Market in Maplewood compares to the 2010 Housing Market in Maplewood.  I'm going to start with a graph, then discuss it's appearance and then drill down further to pull some interesting concepts as to why the data is skewed so much from last year when housing data is generally very similar in its patterning.

So, here is our 1st half stats:


The Blue Bars indicate 2010 a.ka. last year's closed sales of homes per segment of the Maplewood Market and the Yellow bars indicate 2011 a.ka. this year's closed sales of homes per segment of the Maplewood Market.  All data is pulled from the GSMLS for closed sales from 1/1/10 thru 7/10/10 and 1/1/11 thru 7/10/11.  Interestingly enough, this year's yellow bars look more like what anyone would assume a bell curve in housing should look like where it starts at a lower point and ascends to its peak, usually in the middle and then begins is downward descent.

In contrast, last year's housing market looks a little more like a heart monitor with dramatic swings up and then down; note the huge disparity between the $500K-$600K segment of the market that shows 46 closed sales in 2010 and half as many this year.  Since this was the largest segment of the market last year, this is important to note. 

I think it is safe to assume that the First Time Home Buyer Credits probably had a lot to do with this significant spike in 2010.  When I drilled into the data further, I found that of the 46 closed sales between $500K-$600K, 39 of them occurred between 4/1/10 and 7/10/10, exactly when the First Time Rush ensued; similarly, the total Maplewood Market has 90 of its 129 closed sales in the second quarter of 2010.

What does this mean for the Maplewood Market?  Well, if there was a rush of purchases that resulted from the credit, then we can presume that these buyers probably pushed up their efforts to take advantage of the incentive, leaving the second half of the year with a shortfall of buyers.  Given that we ended up taking a heavier load of unsold inventory into the turn of 2011. 

Just to make sure, I went back to the same first half of 2009.  When I add their 102 sales in we get a new chart:

Thus we see that there is a closer resemblance between 2009 and 2011 sales demographics and that 2010 is what we presumed, more of an anamoly.
Also, when tracking each of this first half's, we get more interesting news:
YEAR      AVE. LISTING PRICE          AVE. SOLD PRICE     DISCOUNT
2009                 $471K                                    $458K                     2.8%
2010                 $511K                                    $499K                     2.2%
2011                 $501K                                    $491K                     2.1%
So, while the market may be showing us slightly lower average Listing Prices and Prices Sold, the 2011 figures are still up dramatically from 2009 numbers

If you want to learn more about these results or have any other questions, please feel free to contact me.

Mark Slade
Keller Williams
917.797.5059
marksladehomes@aol.com