Shown below are a series of charts summarizing recent single family home sales in Longmeadow, Massachusetts for the month of September 2008. These results include both MLS and FSBO transactions and are based upon public information obtained from the Hampden County Registrar of Deeds website. The bargraph below shows that the number of Longmeadow home sales from January through September 2008 were significantly lower (-23.6%) vs. results for the corresponding periods in 2007 and 2006 (123 transactions in 2008 vs. 161 in 2007 and 157 in 2006). These results are not surprising given the current national housing and mortgage crisis.
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However, there is some good news in the latest results!
September 2008 home sales results were significantly higher vs. August 2008 (20 vs 12) as well as one year ago results (20 vs. 14). In addition, home sales for the past 2 out of 3 months were higher than the comparable period last year.
Another bright spot with these latest results is the continuing stability and significant increase in the median sales price since May 2008 (see below) suggesting that we may be seeing a bottom forming for Longmeadow real estate market.
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Current sales prices are ~ 4.5% lower than one year ago.
Current home inventory and sales figures indicate the average "time to sell" a home in Longmeadow remained at ~ 10-11 months.
If you are looking to sell your home, consider using our Longmeadow-FSBO service as part of your plan.... or if you have decided to wait until prices have stabilized and the real estate market has improved, try renting your empty home at LongmeadowBiz- House for Rent. If you are looking for a new home (to purchase or rent) check both of these webpages for some great values.
3 comments:
Interesting data, but I'd be cautious about overinterpreting them. With such minuscule sample sizes, one or two sales of unusually expensive or unusually cheap houses could skew the results significantly.
Also, September sales preceded a few huge bank failures and the worst stock market crash since the Depression. It's possible that the Longmeadow real estate market will be unaffected by those momentous events, but not likely.
Alan,
I'm assuming that you are commenting on the increase in "median" sales prices over the past 4 months.
A couple of comments...
1. First of all, I am not a statistics expert but let me try to explain why median (vs. mean) prices are used for real estate.
2. The median is defined as the middle value in a set of numbers. There is no arithmetic involved in finding the median unless the set or distribution has an even number of values, in which case the the two middle values (sometimes defined as lower median and upper median) are averaged to find the median.
3. If the number of sales included in the dataset is large enough, the median sales price is not influenced very much by the addition of 1 or 2 expensive or cheap houses. My analysis uses the trailing 6 months of sales prices so for the Sept median price this included 100 transactions.
In any event, hopefully, the value
of Longmeadow real estate will continue to stabilize and slowly increase.
Jim Moran
Yes, I understand medians and means, and perhaps I phrased my previous comment badly. My point was that each month's sample size is very small, so any apparent trends could be misleading. Using a six-month window certainly mitigates that, but at the expense of artificially smoothing the graph - peaks and troughs will appear less severe than they actually are.
And my second point still stands. Having the wheels fall off the global economy probably won't help our local housing market much. The next few months should provide a better read on that.
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