Believe it or not, houses are selling in the Charlottesville area. It may not feel like it due to the significant amount of inventory currently on the market.
Between 1 September 2006 and yesterday, 27 January 2007, 1188 properties were listed in the MLS (*975 of the properties listed in 06/07 were not condos and 958 listed in 05/06 were not condos).
In that same time period in 2005-2006, 1260 properties were put on the market. Quite simply, homes are taking longer to sell; well-priced homes (priced well from Day 1) are selling.
340 properties were listed from 1/1/5-1/28/2005 and 193 went under contract.
532 properties were listed from 1/1/6-1/28/2006 and 207 went under contract.
441 properties were listed from 1/1/7-1/28/2007 and 116 went under contract
**This post was inspired by my clients whom I showed around this weekend. Their question: “How many properties come on the market?” translated to “How many properties come on the market in Charlottesville/Albemarle?
**Doubly inspired to combat the perception that our market is dead in the water. Properties are in fact selling. Believe it or not.
**Source: CAAR
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My fascination with numbers and data confounds me, as I was an English major and have always had an aversion to math. Ah, well. Adapt and overcome, I guess.
I’m just curious, What constitutes “Well priced”?
Thanks for the numbers, Jim. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out later in the spring. I would think that the really important months are yet to come. In the meantime, the situation doesn’t look very happy for sellers. Using your numbers in Jan. 05, the market cleared 56% of the inventory added. In Jan. of 06, it cleared 39%. This January, that ratio is only 26%. When you combine this with the fact that almost half of the houses for sale are vacant, it looks like selling is only going to get more competitive. Well priced=Low?
Spring will be more telling, absolutely.
Well priced = priced competitively to the market, taking into account recent solds and current competition. Pricing homes according to “what I need to get out of if” is no longer a viable strategy.
Jim,
What do you make of the new Weldon Cooper report that shows despite being down from 2000 Charlottesville City increased in population for the second year in a row? There certainly seems to be a lot of development on the southern end of town that would support this.
UVA08 –
I am working on a post about this and hope to have it finished by the end of the week.
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Jim, when you look at the city’s population increase, make sure you use the corrected numbers form the 2000 census. The original census number counted a bunch of folks in the city that were actually in the county. Most were UVA students.