As I was preparing this summary of Lake Norman's October housing market my curiosity got the better of me. While it is important to compare our sales to October 2007 we are now well over a year in our Lake Norman real estate downturn and so I realized it is very important to now look at our sales in context of the past 4 years to get a grasp of the entire picture of our Lake Norman housing market.
So, first I did my usual monthly analysis:
Lake Norma Real Estate Market Statistics for October 2008
| Lake Norman | 2008 | Average $ | DOM | 2007 | %+/- | Ave $ | %+/- | DOM | %+/- |
| Active Listings | 1593 | $735,515 | 157 | ||||||
| Contingent | 16 | $431,331 | 158 | ||||||
| Conditional | 24 | $930,083 | 186 | ||||||
| Pending | 72 | $544,335 | 145 | ||||||
| Sold | 66 | $437,147 | 128 | 98 | 48% | $453,047 | 3.5% | 102 | +25% |
| Months of Supply | 24.1 |
Briefly, you can see that sales dropped 48% versus October 2007, our months of supply of active listings were down from our high of about 1789, but realtively speakinng are the highest yet at 24.1 months due to the drop in the number of home sales. Okay, so our Lake Norman home sales are still trending downward and our inventory is still exceptionally high.
Knowing we are going into our slowest time of year, I decided to take a look at the historical data by month since 2004 so we can get a better idea of where we have come from to help us determine where we are and future trends for the Lake Norman residetial real estate market. Here is what I found:
Lake Norman Homes Sales by Month; 2004 - 2008
| 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | |
| October | 66 | 98 | 117 | 184 | 129 |
| November | 84 | 88 | 145 | 132 | |
| December | 64 | 132 | 134 | 137 | |
| January | 69 | 87 | 102 | 105 | 70 |
| February | 50 | 105 | 98 | 88 | 74 |
| March | 71 | 151 | 153 | 136 | 124 |
| April | 90 | 120 | 143 | 152 | 115 |
| May | 90 | 152 | 182 | 157 | 176 |
| June | 82 | 169 | 227 | 172 | 184 |
| July | 101 | 147 | 166 | 191 | 187 |
| August | 74 | 144 | 180 | 233 | 181 |
| September | 69 | 105 | 135 | 163 | 133 |
| Totals: | 813 | 1492 | 1743 | 1860 | 1642 |
As you can see, our normal trend is for a slow down in November - February with a spring "bump" and a summer "bump" in sales. All indications are that when I pull November numbers tomorrow they will be about the same as last month. Are we going to drop even more in the months to follow? History certainly indicates that we would expect so. But, my business has actually picked up this past month as three of my buyers sold their homes in the Northeast and Midwest so were finally able to buy here. Is this a positive sign or just a fluke...only time will tell!
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