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With all the scary stuff from Halloween behind us, maybe we can purge those frighteningly high-interest rates as well. In the past week, we’ve seen the snow disappear, the pumpkins and candy disappear and the shock of 8%+ interest rates fade slightly. The snow and pumpkin spice will eventually return, but hopefully, the rates dipping below 7.5% will stick around for a while.
I had some fun pulling stats this month because of the abundance of interesting data. There is a data point that was universally neutral to positive. Sold % of Asking Price is a metric used primarily in the Boulder and NoCo reports. For the past year and a half, it’s been flat to mostly lower. In the Longmont area report you can see a taste of this data point in our guest area of Loveland in the bottom left. I don’t use it in the rest of the Longmont report because I have 18 years of active listing data, which I feel is a better market indicator to track.
Back to my point. The Sold % of Asking Price was UP or FLAT in every single area of every single report, both single-family and attached. How can this be? Have sellers finally come to their senses and started listing their homes for reasonable values? Have agents helped guide their sellers to price appropriately so they wouldn’t need to make price adjustments? Have buyers started demanding fewer concessions? None of these could be completely true, but there must be a good combination of each baked into the overall market returns.
Before buyers, sellers, and agents go patting themselves on their backs for a job well done, how are all the price gains explained? Prices should be falling and the Sold % of Asking Price has been weaker for over a year now. If you haven’t looked at the other regional stats reports that I link in this report, now would be a great time to check out the other areas in Northern Colorado. Yes, there are a few dips in monthly prices, but there are some huge gains too.
Longmont Area Real Estate Stats October 2023
Boulder Area Real Estate Stats October 2023
Northern Colorado Real Estate October 2023
Look at the updated charts in each report as well. With interest rates over 7% since about May, I’d still expect to see price dips despite the low inventory. And, how in the world is there a 17.5% median and a 12.0% average price increase in Longmont last month? Rates didn’t go down the month before when buyers put these houses under contract. The days on market hardly budged for single-family homes in Longmont and Loveland. The growth in days on market for the Longmont attached and the Carbon Valley single-family is purely due to new construction. Both areas fall right in line with the greater market when new builds are adjusted out.
The point I was making when I built this chart last year was to see where Year-to-Date (YTD) prices were headed. It’s hard to tell with the monthly ups and downs. Well, one of my predictions has a good chance to come true, I predicted a flat market this year, and it’s flat. No price gains, no price decreases. Truthfully, the average price of a home in Longmont has decreased, by $768. At a current average of $656,753, the $768 drop isn’t even statistically significant. It’s about 1/10th of one percent or .001.
I did this same calculation for the Ft Collins/Loveland areas and the Boulder, Lafayette, Louisville, Superior area. Look at the orange bars compared to the light blue bars and tell me if you can see that the Ft Collins/Loveland area has an overall average price gain of $7,739 to $665,809. That’s a grand total of a 1.2% gain, which is surely considered flat compared to the 10%-16% gains we’ve experienced over the past several years. The high dollar (2023 YTD Average Price $1,404,289) Boulder area market might be considered an outlier as their average YTD price expanded a full 2.7%. The Boulder market seems to have been an outlier for many reasons, for many years, but maintaining a $1.4 million average price is a feat only outsized by actual price increases amid a market like this.
At this point, you should be asking yourself where all those fun numbers are that I mentioned at the beginning. I’ll admit it, I’ve given you interesting and flat numbers, but nothing close to fun. Try these on for size. In the Boulder graph, I had to cut it down because January 2023 was too tall -it should go all the way to $1,744,845. We haven’t seen a year-over-year (YoY) sales total gain of 81.8% like the one in Louisville in years. Erie now has more 3 more closed sales this year than last for a 0.5% gain. It’s the ONLY area that has more closed sales this year than last, while most areas are at negative 25%. Superior’s monthly average and median prices were both over $1 million for the first time. The average price of an attached home in Loveland went UP by 35.0% (to $479,922) compared to last October. This number was blown out by the 38.6% average price increase (to $1,193,364) of a single-family home in Louisville. But Louisville didn’t win the days on market (DOM) sweepstakes even with their minuscule 27 DOM which included 8 sales of over $1 million; the winner was Superior at 20 DOM with half of their sales closing for over $1 million.
Flat market; crazy numbers; interest rates starting to decline; buyers and sellers working together…what’s next for this market? I don’t know for sure, but if rates continue to trickle down, we may see a pick-up in our generally slow winter market. There are a lot of buyers and sellers who have been hunkered down just waiting to make their move. I’m sure there are a lot of people, like me, who’d rather be in Florida than go through another freezing winter like our last one, and I don’t like Florida… too flat.
