February 2020 Real Estate Market Update – Livingston County, Michigan

We have your Livingston County February 2020 Real Estate Market Update. I know there's a lot of crazy stuff going on right now and the show must go on. So we're going to continue to provide you guys updates, content, stats and kind of walk you through this over the next coming weeks coming months. As I said, the show must go on and we want to provide you this information because it could become potentially very important. It is very important information obviously to know the equity in your home, most people's largest investment they've made in their life. So we want to know what's going on here. That's why this is so incredibly important. A lot of people have their home as their retirement. To a lot of people, it's the largest source of equity. To a lot of people, it's their largest investment. You have to know what's going on with it, obviously, right? We want to continue to give you this information. We will be doing it from the office, we'll be doing it from home if we need to. We'll get this done so that you can make the best decisions for you and your family. Let's jump right into this.

We always preface with two things. We have three years of data that way you can see the trend. Obviously, you want to see the pattern. If we had one year of data, it wouldn't make any sense. Then we have the month in arrears because now we have all the info. It's hot off the press. We are good to go.

Days on market

Sixty-five days on the market two years ago, 68 days the last year, and then 84 this year. Livingston County, I will say has, does have some wonky numbers. Sometimes we do get some abnormalities here and there. But again, with all 18 numbers, you're going to get probably one or two sometimes that are an outlier. So you just gotta take it with a grain of salt in essence. That's a little bit of a weird one. The days on the market probably did increase a little bit, but we'll see how the rest of this plays out here.

Active homes in the market

This is a one-day number. How many homes were actually active on the day that the stats were taken? Four hundred ninety-seven two years ago, 576 last year and 581 this year. So again, more active homes seemingly over the last couple of years they've been on the market. So are they sitting longer or more homes coming on the market right now? It looks like they've been sitting a little bit longer actually.

Months of inventory

Anytime you see that that's the rate at which homes are selling. How long would it take to sell every last home if no new homes came on the market? That is months of inventory. It's a quick ratio to know what kind of market we're in that way you don't have to go through all this litany of numbers to find out where we're at. So I'll give you some context so you know what that means here in a second. But we had three months of inventory two years ago, two months last year, and then back up to three and a half this year. Just to give you context, one to three months is a seller's market, meaning there's not a lot of inventory and prices are going up. Four to six months is a balanced market, seven-plus is a buyer's market, meaning there's a lot of inventory and prices are going down in a crash or recession or something like that. That is your context for what this means. And again, you can very quickly see what kind of market we're in. Obviously, we've been in a seller's market. We've been seeing high equity in homes and higher prices.

New listings

This is the number of new listings, the total number of new listings that actually came on the market this month. This is a month-wide number. New listings, 271 two years ago, 274 last year, then 300 this year. So more homes were coming on the market over the last couple of years, which is a good sign as well because this is a carry-over number. They are going to have homes that have been sitting on the market in the previous months. So this is a good sign to see.

Price per square foot.

$129 last year or two years ago, $141 last year, $143 this year. This is obviously a county-wide number. You can take this and multiply it by your square footage and it's going to give you approximately what your home is worth. Again, to get a real appraisal on your home, you need to have someone, a professional, someone on our team, an appraiser, come see your property, give you an appraisal because you're going to want to take a mile, a two-mile radius around your home, not take the county-wide number. This is more to give you a trend and a pattern of where your equity is going. In general in the County, things have been looking up obviously as they have in most counties. So that's what you need to know there and that context.

Sold

The last one here is the number of people actually signing on a dotted line, selling their home or buying a new home. One hundred forty-nine homes sold two years ago, 168 last year, then 162 this year. A little bit of a drop this year. But again, remember that's been the month previous that was happening and then closing's happening this past month in February.

That's your market update guys for Livingston February 2020. I appreciate you guys more than anything. We will continue to update you here throughout this. I think it's been very important to kind of track this as we always do. And if you are on the podcast, go to @legacygroupmi, on Facebook or YouTube to go comment there, questions, concerns, whatever it may be. If you know someone that could benefit from it who lives in the area or whatever it may be, please share it with them, tag them. We appreciate your time and energy because it's the most important asset that we have. So I appreciate you guys. We will see you on the next piece of content. But more importantly, the next market update as well, to give you the most up-to-date stats in this ever-changing environment. We'll see you guys soon.