Here's an exercise we've been through off and on over the last couple of years. I'm breaking the waterfront sales out by price point (albeit only for this brief period of 2016 thus far) and comparing those sales with the actives. We'll keep in mind that come the first of April there will be far more properties on the market for many have been taken off and will come back on and other new properties will have been delayed in getting put on the market until it seemed like the best time. Personally I'm not sure when the best time is. People who are looking for property tend to have it as an ongoing project, not something that turns on and off. Yes, there are some that exclusively get started in the spring, but I can't tell you what percentage that is.
Here we have sales from January 1 through February 8 for waterfront residential properties in the four counties of the Northern Neck (Richmond, Lancaster, Northumberland and Richmond). And we also have the actives.
Waterfront residential sales 1/1 through 2/8 in 2016
| List price |
# sold |
Median sales price |
Active number |
| Under $200,000 |
1 |
$170,000 |
23 |
| $200,000 to $400,000 |
7 |
$290,000 |
114 |
| $400,000 to $600,000 |
2 |
457,500 |
104 |
| $600,000 to $800,000 |
3* |
$650,000 |
57 |
| $800,000 to $1,000,000 |
0 |
NA |
23 |
| $1,000,000 to $1,200,000 |
0 |
NA |
9 |
| $1,200,000 and above |
1 |
$1,540,000 |
34 |
* Wasn't specifically looking closely at any of these actual sales, but these three jumped out at me. One was on the market for 1237 days. The sales price was 66% of the original asking price.....hmmm, that's a big drop. Then the next one was on for 935 days and sold at 70% of the original asking price. Neither of these say that these were easy sales. The last one of the three sold after 635 days on market and sold for 92% of the original asking price. That seems more like it, although it took close to two years.
Relationships of solds to actives
$200,000 and under 1 sold, 23 active.....that's easy, 23 times as many actives as solds
$200,000 to $400,000 7 sold, 114 active 16.28 times as many actives as solds
$400,000 to $600,000 2 sold, 104 active 52 times as many actives as solds
$600,000 to $800,000 3 sold, 57 active 19 times as many actives as solds
$800,000 to $1,000,000 0 sold, 23 active
$1,000,000 to $1,200,000 0 sold, 9 active
$1,200,000 plus 1 sold, 34 active 34 times as many actives as solds
What may be a bit more encouraging is to divide that "times number" by 12 and come up with approximately how many years inventory we have in each category. That makes some of these numbers look a bit better.
I want to intersperse these blogs with numbers and then thoughts about the market. Later in the week I'm either going to write about Zillow or appraisals or both. Those ideas keep coming to the fore and so one will win out by Friday or so.
