April 2018 Real Estate Market Update – Livingston County, Michigan

We have your Livingston County April 2018 Real Estate Market Update. Let's jump right into it. So we do this and I tell you guys every time, but I get people all the time asking me, "Well, why do you do this? Why we do the last couple of years?" That way you can see a pattern as I know not everyone's going to go in the previous years in our YouTube playlists and down on Facebook and dig, dig, dig to try to find the last couple of years. So I want them to see the pattern. I want everyone to see the pattern of what's going on and that way you can start making decisions that are smart, effective and going to make sense for your family. So, let's jump right into this.

Days on Market

Days on market, DOM. So we have a pretty steady decrease right here over the last two years of days on market. This is average days on market. So, we had basically two and a half months. Now we're down to under two months days on market on average. This all goes and plays into what we've been doing and showing you guys for years now on this that we've been trending towards the seller market. We are smack dab in the middle of an unbelievable seller's market right now. Buyers can't find anything and sellers are making out. That's basically long story short.

Active Homes in the Market

Again, 806 down at 644 down to 579. This is again, another sign as to what's going on. The number of homes is decreasing, so the number of active homes in the market is way down. This is a ratio.

Months of Inventory

The months of inventory, MOI, is a ratio for basically all of these stats together and what it is is at the rate that homes are selling, ow long would it take for every last home to sell if no new homes came onto the market? So if everything stopped and no new homes came in the market, how long would it take for all the homes currently on the market to sell and not one of them, not one of them go there anymore. Not one is active, they're all sold, and it would take three months two years ago. The two, then two, these are rounded numbers. But again, anything below four months of inventory is a seller's market. Four to seven is a balanced, pretty stable. Five to seven months, a stable market. Anything above seven months is a buyer's market. A buyers market is when there are too many homes. There's not enough buying activity going on. So right now, some of these other counties are in one month of inventory. So think about that. Basically, that's where we're at. All these counties, all the Metro Detroit counties are really looking at a steep seller's market.

New homes coming in the market

So this is the number of new homes that came onto the market in the month of April. Really quick, the reason we go back to is that we have now the data of April, this is why we do it. We're in May, but we always go a month back. So in April, we did the March update and you want all that data behind you so we can take all that and extract it and see what exactly happened. This is why we do this the first week, basically the first week or so of every new month we go back and look back at what's going on. So you guys have the correct information.

New Homes

New homes, there's not a lot of new homes coming to market. And that's a lot of a big problem right now. A lot of that has to do with institutional investing and there's a lot of big index funds. The funds that you're investing, that are making you money, good returns, a lot of them are investing in single-family homes. After the recession, there's not a lot of places to go to get returns for customers, for investors, for their people's investors. So they started investing in single family homes and renting them out. So we've got a lot of that going on. We've got a lot of the builders, the national builders are gone. So we've got some regional builders. People say "Brandon are there buildings going on? Yeah, but it's not like it was 10, 15 years ago when you had plenty homes coming building 300 units. Know building up the massive subdivision. Just subdivision after subdivision. We don't see that like we used t, right? So that's why there's not enough homes to meet the demand of what's going on. And that's why we're seeing prices like right here, skyrocket.
We've got the price per square foot, $124 a square foot, $132, $242 a square foot. And that's an average of the county. So an average the counties is $142 a square foot. So if you take your home and multiply square footage times the average price per square foot, that's about what your home is worth. Now you've got to get with an appraiser or a real estate specialist, a real estate agent in order to find out exactly what your home is worth, but it gives you a general idea of what's going on. Basically more or less the pattern of rising $20 over the last two years.

Sold

So the last one really here is a buyer category and again, we don't have too big of a drop, but it's getting there. That percentage drop is somewhat significant, but the number of properties sold in the month of April is we had 300 in two Aprils ago and now we've got just over 250. That percentage drop is somewhat significant. So it's something to note there. Usually, this number doesn't change too, too much. The buyer pool usually stays somewhat the same. A lot of times it gets really, truly affected after a recession, something like that, some big catastrophic event happen.

So, I hope this makes sense for you guys. If you got something out of this or someone who can get something out of this, please tag them or share it with them or give us a thumbs up or something like that. Make sure we know that you got something out of it. Make sure that we know we're going in the right direction and we're giving you guys what you want. So I appreciate you guys more than anything. We appreciate your time, your energy, paying attention to us. Your attention means the world to me because the older I get, the more I realized how important attention and energy and time. That truly is the most important asset that we have. So I appreciate yours and I appreciate all of the messages we get from you guys. All the DMs and the texts and the Q and A and what you guys want to see next. So we appreciate your time and we'll see you soon.