Loudoun County Real Estate Activity March 2007
April 10, 2007
| Loudoun Buyer Intensity |
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Red Bars: HOT (Sellers Market) Blue Bars: COLD (Buyers Market) Gray Bars: Balanced Market |
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INVENTORY:
After a sharp decline the past few months, inventory of homes for sale are rising again, to 3,254 in March from 2,894 in February. New contracts are up 115 homes. New listings rose by over 400 homes. Inventory absorption rate (new contracts / total active inventory) remains a low 17%, up slightly from February. Actual closings (sold) are up by 70 homes.
Average appreciation is up 5.5% from February. Price declines reversed the trend in November rising 1%, 2.5% in December and a surprising 8% in January. Equally surprising is a February 13% drop from the previous month. The median price is also up month to month.
DAYS ON MARKET:
Average time it takes to sell is 129 days, down 6 days from last month. As of today (April 10), days on market for re-sale properties is 134 days (see Loudoun Daily Market Watch).
SOLD TO LIST PRICE RATIO:
The "negotiated" ratio is up 2.5 percentage points to 94%. Successful sellers that lowered their price are still giving buyers another 2 to 3% during negotiations (plus seller subsidies that are not "officially" reported).
NEW CONSTRUCTION:
As of March 31st, the MLS is reporting 572 new homes on the market with only 38 closed, a very low 6.6% absorption rate. These numbers may change as builders are notoriously slow getting their sales posted in the MLS. There are always more for sale and under contract that are not reported. Sales of new construction remains in the doldrums. Huge incentives, price reductions, guaranteed home sale to get sellers to the closing table, and increasing incentives to agents bringing qualified buyers. For buyers: finished basements...sun rooms...closing costs...mortgage payments for the first year.
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Merv,
I believe I did enter merv, lower case. However, it was before I got my morning coffee, so maybe I didn't.
As far as what data would constitute outliers to the dataset, I would ask the question what sales are outside the norm of what we see month to month. My gut says $5.3M is outside the norm, $3.5M probably is, but $2.0M may not be. I'd probably set the limit at $2.5M or $3M, but I don't see the daily samples.
Sean, great question. I asked myself that question this morning and you prompted me to investigate further. Here's what I found:
Three properties appeared in the MLS in the last 15 days (2 of them in the last 3 days): all in Middleburg, 1@ $2.0M, 1@ $3.5M and 1@ $5.3M. The later two were private sales as DOMP in the MLS is 0 days (were not MLS listed and only now entered as documentation).
I have a cutoff of $10M in the data I collect because of a $24M property sold a few months ago distorting the averages.
I went back and used a $1,000,000 or less limit and found the following:
$516,000 average original list
$498,000 average list at contract
$487,000 average sold price
Close to what we were seeing prior to the "spike."
So, that was along way of answering your question. The short answer is yes.
PS: your comment went to the spam folder because you got the pass phrase question wrong. The correct answer is merv and needs to be entered in the box next to the submit button. If that's what you did, then I have something else to debug.
Hello Merv,
Any insight into the sudden spikeup in Loudoun average price this week? Was there one multi-million dollar sale causing an increase of $16K to the average price?
Thanks for sharing your analysis.
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