Longmont Inventory Rising but Sales Totals Lagging

Despite the fact that inventory in Longmont is rising nicely (up 21.6% over last month) total sales are down 21.6% over this time last year for single family homes. Sales of attached dwellings in Longmont are following the same pattern and are down 25.5% year-to-date. Average days on market seems to be the new hot topic among Realtors in this market with many, many reports of multiple offers after just a few days exposure to the MLS. For that reason (and a little side bet), I went inside the numbers again for a closer look at what’s really happening.

First things first. There are only 146 listings that are not under contract. The difference between the reported 264 which includes all pending and active/backup listings and the 146 without a contract yet is 118. That volume of homes under contract leads me to believe that we will exceed the 87 sales that The Predictor says for April, so we should be heading in the right direction to catch-up on the YTD sales total. But of the 146 homes available, there are still only 6 under the $200k threshold.

A look at the 79 sales from March, 50 of them (or 63.3%) went under contract in under 60 days with an average days on market of 30 days. That is much lower than the overall average of 65 DOM. The remaining 29 homes that sold last month had an average DOM of 125 days…nearly double the average. Naturally, you might guess that the houses sold in the higher DOM group would be the higher priced homes, but that isn’t the case. Those homes had an average sales price of $311,413, which is only slightly higher than the average of the other group at $302,048.

This month’s chart is one I created to take another look at our dip in prices over the past seven years. The graph clearly shows higher averages on the left and the right ends of the graph…which is what we have all been hearing about recently. Average prices are trending up and are now in the neighborhood of where they were before the downturn in the economy. The bump up in the middle of the graph is a direct result of first-time home buyer tax credit. One thing that isn’t very clear – and I apologize for my graph-making skills – is that the highest average sales prices for each year occur in the summer months except for 2011, which is when we started to see our current trend of declining inventory and average prices climbed through the fall and winter.

The Boulder County Plains seems to be a strong area. This is typical when the Boulder market takes off because despite the higher prices in the plains area, a buyer can still get a lot more house there than they can in Boulder. A similar rationale applies to the Carbon Valley area, which tends to accelerate when Longmont does…due to better affordability.

Last item. A client of mine told me that we no longer call the Firestone, Frederick and Dacono area the Tri-Towns. It’s now, and has been for quite some time, the Carbon Valley. So, from now on I will refer to this area as Carbon Valley. Please don’t confuse this with any other Carbon Valley you may know about. I’m sure I will occasionally forget and call it the Tri-Towns again, my apologies in advance to all Carbon Valley-ers….or is it Valley-ites?

Overall the area isn’t experiencing skyrocketing prices, just nice and steady appreciation again. This is good because it keeps the big peaks and valleys out of the mix and is better for the long-term health of the market.