Today I have some more fodder to share for the next time you’re talking about local real estate. Check out the images below and you’ll be able to answer: What usually happens to sales volume in April and May in Sacramento County? What role are interest rates and inventory playing in the market right now? You can scan the images briefly or take a few minutes to read the text too. Any insight or questions? I’d love to hear your take in the comments below.
Monthly Sales: Here are all monthly sales in Sacramento County since 2001. The dark lines are the month of April.
March vs. April: Here is a bit of a closer look. What happens with sales volume from March to April? What happens after the month of April?
Change in Volume: There really isn’t a definitive pattern other than to say sales volume in April is usually about 5-10% more or less than what it was in the month of March. This time around it looks like there is going to be an increase in volume from last month to this month. On the other hand, sales volume almost always increases from April to May, so we can likely expect more sales in the next bit of time so long as the market behaves “normally”. Ultimately, sales volume is ALWAYS higher in March through May than the beginning of the year, which shows the consistency and reality of the Spring seasonal market.
Median Price & Inventory: Can you see how over time lower inventory tends to lead to increases in value whereas higher inventory tends to cause a cooling or declines? The same holds true for interest rates as you can see below. Right now inventory is around 2.0 months, which means there are about two months worth of houses listed for sale on the market. Keep in mind there were about 2400 listings at the beginning of this month and roughly 1200 sales last month. We get 2.0 months by dividing the number of listings by last month’s sales (2400 divided by 1200 = 2).
Seeing the Layers: I call these my busy graphs because there is so much going on – especially in the last one. This is how real estate works though. There are many different “layers of the market” that influence value at any given time. It’s never just about supply and demand. There is always more to the story.
Questions: How do these graphs strike you? Any thoughts or insight?
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