First off, the beautiful Rattlesnake Valley, the mouth of which features some of the oldest homes in Missoula.  A largely residential area that has seen very little to no new construction growth.  Historically this area has held it's values which have usually been well over the median of Missoula's entire market.

First off lets look at 2010.  There were 50 residential sales with a median sales price of $314,950.  The average time on market for the sold listings only was 116 days.  The median listing price of homes in the Rattlesnake for 2010 was $334,000 so comparing median list to median sales you get homes selling for about 94% of their original list price based upon these 50 sales.  Of these 50 sales there was just 1 foreclosure sale.

Now fast forward to 2011.  There were 59 residential sales with a median sales price of $285,000.  The average time on market for the sold listings only was 125 days.  The median listing price of homes int he Rattlesnake for 2011 was $300,000 so if you compare median list to median sales we see that homes are selling for 95% of their original listing price.   Of these 59 sales there were just 3 foreclosure sales.

Comparing the two we see some good news and some challenging news.  First of all, activity is up by just 9 sales but since this market is smaller in volume that represents an 18% increase in overall volume.  However, what we see is a big dip in median sales price, just over a 9.5% decrease.  We did see that the time on market extended just a touch and pricing closer to the sales price improved just slightly as well. 

Of course the big challenge is that I cannot go back and pull up the 2010 absorption rates, that is a much more true comparison of the markets because it takes active and under contract homes into account.  Looking at the 2011 numbers the current 12-month calculated absorption rate shows that the Rattlesnake currently has 8.5 months worth of inventory listed, a small over-supply.  However calculating absorption rates in the winter over a 12 month time-frame will usually pull more optimistic numbers because in the winter a lot of people take listings off the market and wait until the spring.

Looking forward I expect things to maintain a similar course for this area.  Sales will probably hang around similar numbers in volume.  Right now there is just 1 pending sale in the Rattlesnake so it's a slow early start up there, but their sales usually pick up in the summer.   Foreclosures do not play a major role at all in this area and will not have a significant impact on values again, I would think.

This was a real sign on a street we were on recently looking at houses in Missoula's Rattlesnake neighborhood. We just had to stop and take a picture.

I guess they really don't want people driving on their street to turn around! :)

The sign says it all! Happy Sunday!