NEWS RELEASE
KYLE SNYDER FIRST AMERICAN TITLE
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After you look at the stats reports this month, I challenge you to find anything surprising in the data. If you can, you haven’t been paying attention. After reviewing all three reports, covering all of Northern Colorado, you should have the same lack of surprise as I do. This market is acting exactly the way it should under current economic conditions.
The only “concern” in any of these reports are the outrageous percent increases in days on market in a few markets. I have to actually put the word “concern” in quotes because it isn’t a concern at all. For example, the days on market in Firestone, Frederick and Dacono increased a whopping 376.9%! Why is this a “concern” instead of a concern? It’s up from 13 days! The fact that it was at 13 days at any time in history is an actual concern… not the current 62 days, nor the increase from 13 to 62 days. In fact, 62 days on market is right in line with the rest of Northern Colorado, except for a few areas with substantial new construction.
The average and median prices are finally, actually acting exactly as they should… up a little or down a little. When one of these data points shows a negative number, it does not mean prices are falling and it does not mean that some story you read about the pending housing crash is coming. It means finally prices aren’t skyrocketing out of control despite me hearing several stories of buyers getting beat out in price wars in FEBRUARY 2023. Get used to these results for another few months.
I’ve asked it before and I intend to keep asking the naysayers, the doomsday predictors, and the foreclosure tsunami knuckleheads… when will it happen? When will the sky fall? Next week? Next Month? In July? We have been hearing about it for about three years, since the start of lockdown, and then it got louder when interest rates rose and… nothing. Well, the very first thing we’d need is inventory to climb out of control… more sellers than buyers… then we’d have a problem. But sellers have nowhere to go, nothing to buy, and we still have the greatest amount of equity in history, so, I ask again… when is it going to happen?
- Longmont Area Real Estate Stats February 2023 (.pdf)
- Longmont Area Real Estate Stats February 2023 (.jpg)
- Boulder Area Real Estate Stats February 2023
- Northern Colorado Real Estate Stats February 2023
In the chart this month, new listings data is represented by the black line. It has a similar pattern over the past two years, but not the same results. If we add up all those data points in all of the reports and compare them, last year there were 934 fewer listings in Northern Colorado than there were in 2021. Well, thanks to a spike in interest rates adversely affecting affordability we also had 2,097 fewer overall sales, which is a 19.4% decline. And, notably, last year saw a 45.5% increase in Withdrawns and Expireds over the prior year.
I hope you look at this month’s graph with some interest. If we observe the dips in both the red (closings) and black (new listings) lines, we can see the past four months have the fewest new listings and fewest sales of the year. This is a perfect graphic description of the seasonality of our market. It happens every year… it’s just a bit lower this year. Additionally, it’s evident that beginning in June, when interest rates climbed past 5.5%, the sales started to slow in comparison to the previous year. Most experts by now have pegged this range of 5.5% to 6.0% as the affordability tolerance of the market. We are looking for a return to this range, with some stability, to bring both buyers and sellers back out to play.
A couple local observations before I let you go: Longmont attached days on market would be 35 if not for a 212-day listing of a Fox Hill townhome. Similarly, the average and median values in the Longmont attached category were highly influenced by the sale of an $865,000 attached home in Prospect. This goes to show how even a median value can be influenced by a small data set.
Just like the example in the second paragraph of the Carbon Valley days on market, Longmont is way better off now at 62 days then it was last year at 20. Remember that market? It even stressed-out sellers who were getting more than asking. You know it’s an unhealthy market if that’s happening. The listing inventory in Longmont and Firestone are almost exactly where they were last year. That’s reassuring. Typically, they have trended lower over the past several years.
Our guest market this month is Loveland. These nice neighbors to the north are trending the same as the rest of the region with fewer sales, higher days on market and hovering median and average sales prices. They also have a healthy attached home market that’s one of only two markets with a higher February sales total compared to last year, the other being the attached home sales in Erie, Superior, Lafayette and Louisville.
Spring is right around the corner and we are cautiously optimistic sellers will return to the market. Without them, our buyers will have no place to buy. And while we have no control over that, let me give you two last stats that strongly suggest agents need to rediscover the age-old practice of keeping in touch with their database. Last year there were 17,866 homes sold from Boulder to Erie to Ft Collins and out to Greeley. There were about 7,400 agents who did those transaction. There simply aren’t that many agents in Northern Colorado. If you look at the new listings, you’ll see they come here with very little local knowledge from Colorado Springs, Parker or Lakewood. Even more remarkable was that 2,430 agents did just one deal in Northern Colorado. That’s a whopping 13% of all sales. Some of them were new agents, but many of them were from out of market.
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