August 2018 Real Estate Market Update – Livingston County, Michigan

We have your market updates. We’re going to run through all the market updates. All the Metro Detroit properties, Oakland County, Livingston, Wayne, Macomb, Genesee. We’re gonna go through all of them. So let’s jump right into this. I tell you guys, every single time we have these three years, you can see the patterns. We want to see the patterns and what’s going on in the market. That way, if I just showed you this data right here one year, it wouldn’t make any sense, right? So I always preface it with that. We’re going into three years of data that way we can see that pattern and when you see the patterns, you then can make decisions. You then know the story as Rich Dad said, Robert Kiyosaki’s mentor-rich dad always said, “Numbers tell a story.”

Days On Market

Days On Market, 2016 until 2017, 2018, the last two years we had a steep drop. Almost a 10-day drop in Days on the Market, average days on the market for a home to stay on the market.

Active Homes in the Market

This hasn’t changed too much. Again, this is just a day in time, you know, number of active homes on the property at a given day when we check this data. So again, it gives you an idea of what’s going on, but you know, you can’t take too much, you can’t look into it too, too much. But it does give us an idea of, “Hey, at any point in a given day, in a month, toward the end of the month, how many active properties we’re on the market?”

Month Of Inventory

MOI is Month Of Inventory. What month of inventory means is that “how long does it take every last home to sell if no new homes came on the market?” So we had the recession, you know, we were at 8, 15, 20 months of inventory. Right now, we are in the three to one and a lot of counties and we’re seeing it in Macomb and Wayne and things of that nature. So we are in a steep, steep seller’s market and it’s because of just high demand but truly not even that so much. We’re seeing it because there’s not a ton of inventory, there’s not a ton of homes out there to be had. So again, we had the stats before. We’ve seen a lot of two and one months over the last few months. So that again, this is changing a tiny bit and it looks like it might be coming up a little bit. Interest rates are rising a little bit, so maybe that’s why it peaked back up again a little bit. But again, this trend has been pretty, pretty stable over the last year or two. So, again it’s been going along that same theme. So no huge changes yet.

New Homes in the Market

So new homes that came onto the market in the month and we actually have an uptake. So we actually had more homes that came on the market. So when you look at that, and that’s why we probably have a little bit more inventory. We’ve got a little bit more months of inventory because we’ve had a few more homes coming to market than we usually have last couple years. So interesting again, something to watch as the months play out here.

Price per Square Foot

Price per square foot though has risen dramatically over the course of that time. Generally leading us to believe that there’s a drop in inventory and a lot of the other numbers kind of flush that out. Again, this generally has to do with existing and inventory from the month previous and then this month there’s a little bit more inventory coming on. So maybe next month that drops a little bit. You never know. But again, something to watch and us to keep our eye on.

Sold

The number of sold properties. This doesn’t change too, too much. These percentage changes are a little bit wild, especially this year to this year. But they really don’t go catastrophically necessarily and that’s the 25% decrease. So that’s a fairly big drop. But the buyer pool generally doesn’t change too much unless there’s a huge catastrophic event like a recession or depression or something like that. So that’s very interesting. Again, something to keep our eyes on and there is some funky numbers going on here, but as a whole, we’re seeing a low inventory, obviously not a ton of homes coming on the market in general. There are only three months of inventory. So a balanced market is four to six months of inventory.

So I hope that gives you guys an idea of what’s going on in Livingston. We’re going to hit the other counties and show you guys that. But again, this is Livingston in August remember, it’s August. We’d go in arrears, we go back because we now can see all the data. Everything’s close, everything’s done. Finally, we have the most up-to-date information for you. So appreciate your time and energy and we look forward to seeing the other market updates.