I realize I haven't completed my earlier exercise and will get back to it later this week and finish up. Thos higher price points need to be explained in context, but not today. Today I have an overview that is helpful in general. Shows that the residential market is up and the land market is down. Shows that we are about holding our own with residential sales, albeit at lower price points. We also don't have a huge amount of inventory of active properties, which is good. Land doesn't have any of that it its favor. You'll see. The numbers just really jump out at you about land sales. (Sales are for the four counties of the Northern Neck: Lancaster, Richmond, Westmoreland and Northumberland.)

As I said, not a bad market for the Northern Neck residential market.  Interesting to look at a certain relationship here, though....if the 505 sales of 2016 are 75% of the total actives (670), then what do we have when we figure 75% of the active dollars ($284.2 million)? The answer is $213.15 million which is quite the far cry from $138.3 million....just another way of looking at the residential market and see how the higher priced properties are very much present in the active market. The disconnect between the median sales price of the solds this year ($225,000) and the actives ($329,000) is another indication of a pricey side to the active properties. We'll see if next year changes this at all. I know Realtors are looking forward to a better market.

And yes, 2016 has the lowest number of properties sold in the 5 years that MLS covers. Granted the dollar value is a bit better than 2012, but not much. The days on market are significant but not anything like that for the actives at 444 DOM. There are also 886 properties for sale versus the 96 that have sold so far this year.....a lot of inventory is certainly an understatement. The strong belief is 2017 will be a better year. Let's certainly hope so, and especially for land.   --Kathryn Murray