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Real estate: Soaring home prices and low inventory push beyond limits of a healthy market

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Business man hand hold the house model saving small house. House insurance

The Longmont Leader accepts contributions, photos, and op-eds for publication from community members, business leaders and public officials on local topics. Publication will be at the discretion of the editor and published opinions do not represent the views of The Longmont Leader or its staff. To submit a contribution, email [email protected].

Get your magnifying glass out. I tried to squeeze too much info into my charts again this month. Sorry. I tried some alternate versions, but I wanted you all to see this. In case you can’t see it, click the link for a reader friendly version that isn’t so squished - Large Print Chart

The number one thing that has me most concerned in this time of extremely low inventory is our potential to keep overall sales volume up so prices don’t go parabolic. It’s too late. We are there. We have been going over the supply/demand stuff in this article for a while now and we saw the overbidding on new listings hit Ludacris Speed a while back. But the monthly results I publish here aren’t a great indicator of what’s going on in the bigger picture. We need a bigger data set to really start drawing conclusions of what’s happening in the market.

After a full six months of 2021, we have a body of results big enough to evaluate logically. Looking at the graphs in the middle of the report, the bar graph on the left shows the total number of homes sold this year through six months versus the same period for the nine previous years. Here, we see excellent results this year. In fact, we’ve sold the second-highest number of homes in the past six years. And last years’ total was the second-highest versus the eight previous years. In hindsight, this is pretty good because we are turning over a lot of homes even though we can’t build up inventory.

The good news really ends with the paragraph above. First, we set the world record high for first-half average price at $565,772. Next, we set the biggest gain in average first-half average price with 2021 coming in 15.5% higher than 2020. This gain beat out the 13.2% we set between 2016 and 2017. And since prices usually cool off as we near the end of the year, 2017 ended with an overall increase of 10.2%. And lastly, despite a few sticky points gaining momentum in the economy right now, we are going to have a full-year average price gain of over 14%.

This is patently not good, especially when a healthy market is defined as having an average of a 6% yearly price increase. To arrive at a 6% average, we need a few years with a little more than 6% and a few years with a little less than 6%. Our first-half price gains over the past five years have been nothing short of psychotic at (starting in 2017): 13.2%, 6.6%, 2.3%, 5.4%, 15.5% for an average of 8.6%. Enough! Make it stop. How can I predict the future when things are like this?

June 2021 Longmont Area Real Estate Statistics (.pdf)

June 2021 Longmont Area Real Estate Statistics (.jpg)

Here are some other highlights in the report:

  • The Carbon Valley has an Average and Median price of over $500,000 for the first time ever.
  • The Average Price in the Boulder County Plains has exceeded $1,000,000 for the eighth consecutive month.
  • With a total of 29 active listings, Longmont currently has 6.3 days of inventory.
  • In June, there were 33 sales in the Boulder County Plains of over $1,000,000 ($3.3M highest!)
  • Three income-restricted homes sold in Longmont for $225,000 each on an average of 48.3 days on market.

 

Cheers,

Kyle Snyder

[email protected] 

720-534-8355