Current Real Estate Trend--A study of RI market (Jan~Mar, 2009)

Disclaimer: This research is released as is. While all information is deemed accurate, no strict academic validation has been done due to my time constraint. Readers are encouraged to duplicate this research if you need to make serious decisions based on this research.
I spent about 4 hours on researching the current Real Estate market in Rhode Island yesterday and today as a preparation for our next move in the real estate market.
I mainly want to address three questions.

1. What is the current overall market condition in Rhode Island.
2. What kinds of properties are sell-able?
3. whether marketing helps sell a property. I use Virtual Tour as an example.

The data were pulled from RI-MLS system in Apr 14.

1. Sold listings from Jan to Mar, 2009: single family homes, condo, multi-family homes.
2. Expired listings from Jan to Mar, 2009: single family homes, condo, multi-family homes.
3. Current active listings in Rhode Island (exclude timeshare, mobile homes and modular homes).

Below are partially what I found (the full report is available upon request).

1. from Jan 1, to Mar 31, 2009, 1973 listings were sold state-wide, with a total transaction of $375 Million.  1288 listings were closed in Providence county. 336 in Kent. 198 in Washington, 97 in Newport and 54 in Bristol.
2. On3 interesting result is that on overage, sale prices are 3 quarters of assessment. This is true statewide. Town wise only Jamestown is slightly over assessment.
3. Of all the closed listings, listing prices were also below assessment statewide. Of all the 39 towns, only Portsmouth, Newport and Jamestown were exceptions.
4. Among the 1973 closed listings, 248 had Virtual Tour (VT). I studied the effect of VT on sold price/listing price(SL). I divided the data into two groups: with and without VT.  The mean of SL are 82% and 85%. So VT did seem to help in getting a higher price but the difference is not significant--a mere 3%.

   

   I then studied how VT affects the DOM--days on market. The result is astounding: A mean of 98 days vs 158 days. The T-test is 0 (less than 1 billionth).

   For those who understand statistics, that means the two data set definitely got different means. In plain English: VT definitely help sell a listing faster!!

   See the right picture for more details.

5. I then studied the EXPIRED listings from Jan~March. There are 97 of them.

   • On average, the listing prices are 20% above assessment.
   • None of them had Virtual Tour.
6. Finally, I looked at the current market. There are 7418 listings that meet my data standard (I didnot include timeshare, mobile home, etc) and 2684 of them are priced over assessment.

So here are the major conclusions from this brief study:

1. Marketing is very important in helping selling a house faster, if not more in price.
2. To sell a house in a timely manner, you need to price it close or below assessment.

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