Am ashamed to admit this but . . .
The other day, when I had a bit of idle time, I began to wonder when the real estate market in the Fredericksburg Virginia area began to make its turn from a seller's market to what it is now. A good friend of mine and I have been tracking statistics every month for more than a year now. I had gathered monthly reports (provided by our MLS system) for that period.
I decided to make a graph to see if that would support our thoughts. On one axis I placed the time period beginning in January of 2005 and divided each month into number of listings on the market at the end of the month and number of listings sold during that month. I also added a third number (and that was a dollar figure rather than a pure number) and it was the median sold price. I recognized that I was mixing numbers but that made no difference to the information I wanted to present.
On the other axis was numbers going from zero to 5000 (picked that number because there were about 4000 homes listed at the end of last month).
After plotting all of the data for the past year and one half plus, I came up with a very revealing graph. The graph concluded that the market began a drastic change in July of 2005; we have been telling people it began in August 2005 (were relying on memory).
Have thought about integrating the List Price to Sold Price percentage during that period but have not done so yet. I noted on the last report published that the percentage had dropped about 2% from the same month in the previous year.
Did all of this manually and hope to figure out how to use some computer program to do it for me. Am not that well versed on Excel (not well versed is a gross exaggeration since I have never used it).
You might find it worthwhile to do the same thing for your market area. Then, when a person asks you why their home has not sold you will be able to show them the type of competition they have and show them the trend(s).
Comments(7)