February 2019 Real Estate Market Update – Livingston County, Michigan

We have your Livingston County, February, 2019 Real Estate Market Update. Let's jump right into this.

I preface every single video. Been doing this for a few years now obviously, and I say this every time. We are like clockwork on these market update videos cause there's really not much else to it other than giving you guys why we do it, how we do it and the numbers. We do the month in arrears. We do the month previous because we have all the data. It's just like getting the numbers of the job numbers from the government. It's the first week, the first Friday we did the first Thursday after the end of the month, we have all the data, it's all relevant and new and it's all good to go. So that's why we do it this way. We also need to be three years of data because we want you to be able to see patterns. If we just gave you 2019, if we just give you one year, it wouldn't make any sense. So we wanna give you three sets of numbers, you can see everything, you can see the patterns that are forming. So let's jump right into this - Livingston County.

Days on Market

The first one, DOM. If you see that anywhere it means days on market. We have an interesting pattern here. Actually, we have 63, 65 and 68. 2017, 2018 and 2019, it's actually going up by a couple of days over a year, which is kind of interesting. It's kind of unlike a lot of the other markets we're seeing right now in every other county in southeast Michigan. So it's an interesting pattern, kind of an outlier if you will, a little bit abnormal sometimes. All 18 numbers for each county we do every month, there's sometimes one or two outliers. So keep that in mind, but also just remember that the patterns we're seeing everywhere even across the board here in Livingston still are telling us a sellers market and I'll get to that more here in a second.

Active homes in the market

620 to 497 and then back up the 576 this year, 2019. A good increase in the amount of homes in the market at that time. What that is is a one day snapshot though, but that's why we do three years of data. That's when the day those numbers are pulled, that's how many homes are actually on the market in Livingston County. We give you that three years, again, you can see the pattern. That's the most important thing. So we can see that it went down but it came back up again a little bit. So there are a good number of active homes in the market. Not where we are seeing on in '14, '15 and '16. But still, we're trending the better direction than we were last year with under 500 last year.

Month of Inventories

The next one is months of inventory, MOI. Whenever you see that - it's a quick ratio to know basic all this data in one quick snapshot. We had three, three, and then down to two actually. So again, this is where I was telling you, you gotta take days on market. You got to take one or two of these numbers sometimes. These abnormal outliers with a grain of salt. Months of inventory means that at the rate homes are selling, how long would it take every last home to sell if no new homes came into the market? So that's it, a quick ratio. I want to give you guys a little context here. A seller's market would be one to three months. That's a seller's market. Four to six is a balanced market. And then seven plus is a buyer's market. So you can see really how steep of a seller's market really it is. We're down in the two range, which we are seeing obviously last year, a lot of one month for across the board and all the counties in southeast Michigan. So a really strong seller's market bouncing up just a little bit here over the last handful of months.

New homes in the market

So this is the number of new active homes that came on the market in the month. 2017, we had 314 and then we had 271 and then 274 this year. Down a tiny bit in Livingston, we're at 2018 levels. We'd like to see that up a little bit more. However, it's kind of the sign of the times we're in right now. This is just what's going on. That's why I said like all these other numbers are showing us as a seller's market yet the top line, we had days on the market. We had some abnormalities.

Price per square foot

This is a general rule of thumb guys. This is county wide. If you want a true home analysis on your home, Zillow's not going to do it. This number is just a rule of thumb. It's not going to do. You need to have an appraiser. You need to have our team, a real estate professional over and actually viewing your home, walking the neighborhood, seeing what's going on, giving a true report as to what's going on. This just gives you an idea. If you took your square footage and multiply by this number about what your home would be worth. So 114 two years ago, 129 last year and 141 this year. So again, the price is going on. When there's inventories down and demand stays the same or demand goes up, you have prices going up. And that's exactly what we've seen.

Sold

This last one is really the buyer statistic. The buyer category shows us kind of the buyer pool and what's going on. The buyer pool doesn't generally change too, too much unless there's a catastrophic event like the recession we had 10 years ago. We had 194 two years ago, 149 last year, back up a little bit to 168. The buyer pool shouldn't change too, too much. It's good to see, it's gone back up a little bit just because of the things like the interest rates and different things that are going on, events that are scaring buyers a little bit. It's good to see that this number has gone back up again a little bit because last month or two we've seen some little dips in those numbers, which have been a little bit alarming. But it's good to see those numbers bounced back up again a little bit.

So again, that was the Livingston County Market Update for February, 2019. I look forward to bringing you guys your next updates. Be on the lookout for all of our stuff. You guys were listening on the podcast and joining in the conversation and come to our Facebook channel, Legacy Group MI, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn. If you guys have questions on here, on the live stream, please put the messages in the comment section that way we can answer them all and everyone can see them and everyone can learn and grow from them. So we appreciate your time, your energy, your attention. That really means the world to us and honored to have it, and we will talk to you very soon.