January 2019 Real Estate Market Update – Oakland County, Michigan

We have your Oakland County, January 2019 real estate market update. Let's jump right into this. Every time we do these market updates, every single month, I preface it with a couple of things. One, people always ask still, which is fine. We get new viewers every month. So we got our answer tois this question every month. We do the month previous, just like jobs report when the government comes out, the jobs report the first Friday after the end of the month, first Thursday at the end of every month, after the end of the month, we have all the data. All the data is now finalized. We have it all or we can go back and show you the most accurate data as to what's going on. And then we give you three years of data because we want you to be able to see what is going on. The trend is your friend and the numbers tell that trend. They tell the pattern. If we just gave you this year, it wouldn't mean anything to you, but now that we can show you this and explain this to you, you can see what's going on and it makes more sense, right? Most of us, a lot of us are visual people, right? So being able to see that makes it way more sensitive. I just sit here and talk about it. So let's jump right into this.

Days on market

Thirty-seven, 53 days on market up to 60. So he had some weird stuff going on here in Oakland County, actually. The days on market has really been jumping all around. We have more homes in the market. Went down last year actually. So it's interesting that this number went up, but again, we're going to see another funky number down here. Sometimes we get some abnormal numbers. You get some weird anomalies in the data, so don't look too far into that one number specifically. You've got to look at all the 18 numbers. You gotta look at all of the numbers and see exactly what's going on. You can't just take one number and extrapolate it out, right? You've got to take most numbers, 15 or 16 of the 18 numbers going a certain direction, you know that you have that pattern, you got that trend. So again, this is active. The days on market that active home is just one day in time. It's the day that we take the data - how many homes are actually active at that time? And again, we saw the drop and then we saw go up sharply this year.

Month of inventory

Then you see reflected in this month of inventory. Months of inventory is that the right homes are selling if no new homes come on the market, how long will it take to sell every last home? Well, we've seen it. We've seen it go all the way up to four, believe it or not, which I say that jokingly because it's this number has not ever been going down for a couple years now. Really a handful of years and now we're finally starting to see a tick up again a little bit. So just to give you perspective, we have a balanced market or a seller's market is zero to three months. That's a seller's market. Four to six months or four to seven months is a balanced market and then a buyer's market is seven plus. So when you have a recession or something like that, we had 10 years ago, we had 10, 12, 15 months of inventory, tons of homes in the market. So it gives you an idea, a very quick snapshot. As I said, you'd be able to see this number and know what kind of market we're in. So we're entering a little more of a balanced market, more homes coming in the market, the buyer pool, staying about the same, which it usually does. So, it's got to be a little more balanced market.

New homes in the market

This is the number of new active listings that came on the market in this past month. So we had 2300 here, went down a little bit last year, which again, the numbers across the board and all the counties were the same basically in that regard and then going up again a little bit this year. More homes listed in Oakland County than the last couple of years, which again, we're seeing that across the board right now, which is a very interesting sign as to what's happening. I think people are starting to get sick of just waiting and waiting. They want to get some equity somehow, hopefully, and get out and move. I think a lot of it us pent up from last year too. So it's gonna be an interesting time this year to see what happens with that.

Price per square foot

Again, some weird numbers here. Not really sure. Honestly, I think we would just cross that out honestly because it just doesn't make a ton of sense. I think there's some weird stuff going on. You could have had a number of really big home sell that can kind of skew the data even though there is a lot of quantity in here. But again, some weird things going on, this is more like what's natural going into $111 and then up to $115 a square foot. So that makes sense. Price is still climbing a little bit because the price just takes a little bit of time to adjust for what's actually happening in the market. What was happening the last couple of months is reflective in this price data. So if homes are on the rise and there's more inventory, then those prices should be reflected in the months to come, probably three, six months to come. So we'll see. That's the ,price per square foot for the entire county. Remember that guys, if you want an actual value of your home, do not go to Zillow, do not go to homes.com, do not go to Trulia, do not take this data right here, countywide as gospel. You have to have an appraiser, you've got to have a real estate agent or someone that is professional in that area, gets you an evaluation on your home because this is just county-wid if I could speak. This is county-wide, so you multiply your square footage by that number and you get about what your home is and that's in essence what Zillow does. They use an algorithm, they look at your zip code, they look at what's going on and they just give you this amalgamated "Hey, here it is. This is about what it is." So you've got to get someone in to come in, see what's going on in the neighborhood. Give you that actual comparison.

Sold

This last one here is really our buyer statistic and this is telling us what the buyer pool is like. And again, it's gone down a little bit and it stayed the same basically since last year, even went up just a tad. Which again, a macro economicgood sign, buyer pool doesn't change all that much unless there's a recession or depression or something like that. We've got a lot of good data trending in the right direction. Hopefully gonna be a little more balanced this year. I'm thinking it's gonna be a bit more balanced. Many of you will watch our Insider's videos, Insider's Reports we do monthly and that goes in. This is the micro economic report. Basic macroeconomic report, which is global economics, what's going on, geopolitics, trade tariffs, credit bubbles, asset bubbles, student loan, debt. We talked about all that stuff and price versus value, all these really big things. We talk about possible crashes, we've talked about possible recessions and again, there's a lot of people predicting that might happen this year, but if it doesn't, I think that it could be a really good year. It could be a very good year for buyers and sellers here in Metro Detroit because things should hopefully be a little more balanced as you can see in that four to six range, maybe climbing a little bit. We'll see. Interest rates rising, a lot of these different things going on that's spooking the markets a little bit and I think that's why it has people sitting on the sidelines a little bit and there's people that are wanting to sell before and there's buyers that maybe are sitting on the sideline just a tiny bit.

So again, there's a lot of stuff going on. It's hard to decipher, obviously just with a handful of numbers. This gives you an idea of what's going on in your community. If you know someone who lives in Oakland County you think they can benefit from it or need some help, need some guidance, please share this with them, tag it, tag them. We really appreciate your time, your energy, your comments, the love you guys gavein the feedback and the BS you guys give us. We really appreciate it. If you have questions, comments, concerns, please put it in the feed. Please put in the comment section. That way we can answer it here and benefit the most amount of people and most people can see it. We love all the private messages we get. But again, like I said, we want to try to help many people as possible, so I appreciate your time and energy more than anything in the world. It's the most important thing that we have and just humbled and honored. So thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon.