March 2019 Real Estate Market Update – Oakland County, Michigan

We have your Oakland County March 2019 Real Estate Market Update. Let's jump right into this thing. So I preface every single video with a couple of things, all these market update videos. The first one is that we do three years of data. We have 2019, 2018, 2017. That way you can see the trend. The trend is your friend in all investing. And we want to see the trend of what's going on. If I just give you this year's data, it wouldn't make any sense to you. So remember that. We do the month in arrears, previous, because we now have all the data. just like the government comes out with the jobs report the first Friday after the month. We come out same data for the market here with our real estate information. Same exact thing. All of the data's hot off the press, the month is done and we have all of it for you so you can make decisions for you and your family, right? That's why we're doing this. The last thing is something new and it's our podcast that we have and we were going to be kind of walking through each data point here a little more in detail. That way those of you on the podcast can hear what's going on and you don't have to see it cause it's a little bit hard, obviously talking about numbers and trying to see trends when you're on a podcast. We'll dive into that a little bit more here as we go. But, I appreciate you guys being here. Let's jump right into this thing - Oakland County, March 2019.

Days on market

This is the average days that a listing is on the market in Oakland County and you're going to see all the 18 data points. Sometimes that there are some abnormalities, some anomalies in the data. We generally want to see what does what the 14 or 15 other points are saying and if they're generally telling us one thing, we know that to be true, but there might have some weird ones here and there. Like this one in 2017, there is 22 days on market as the average, 56 last year and then 60 this year. So again, 22 looks like it's the anomaly in this one. We're going to have one of those weird numbers. But it has gone up a little bit since last year, which is kind of to be seen just because there could be different things going on. There could be some different data. Also, there was some little dip and some different stuff in our data over the last month or two. So it doesn't surprise me that things kind of bumped up again a little bit this past month.

Active homes in the market

This is the a one day snapshot when the data was taken. So this is where you want to look at the trend to see what's going on from the last couple of years and not necessarily something that is going to give you a month-wide data. But it's going to give you a trend over the last couple of years as you can see. So we had 4,000 in 2017, 3,569 last year and 4,070 this year. A pattern we're seeing a lot was the up-down-up through a lot of the counties, through a lot of statistics. So again, we have that here where there was a number of active homes that were I should say there were more active homes this year than there was last year. More along the lines of 2017.

Months of inventory

That is at the rate which homes are selling, how long would it take to sell every single home without any new homes coming on the market? And as you can see here, we had 2 two years ago to last year and then 3 this year, three months of inventory. So just to give you guys some context, one to three months is a seller's market. Four to six is a balanced market. And then the seven-plus is a buyer's market. So you can see were still in a seller's market. It has changed a little bit just because some of the numbers have fluctuated up above there. And it's gonna be interesting to see going forward because we're going to get to this in the next number in a second, this next stat which is going to be telling going forward. This ratio is very quick to say, "I know exactly what's going on at a second's notice in this market, in which way it's trending." So that is the month of inventory.

New homes in the market

This is the new listings that came online here in the month of March. Two years ago we had 3,225, 2018 we were down to 3096 and then this year we're down to 2,949, so 2,949 homes. So again, we're down with the new listings going forward. So we're going to see in the next month or two how that plays out. But again, we've seen this kind of throughout much of Detroit, kind of county wide, throughout all the counties who've seen a lower low new listing totals except Macomb County. It's the only one that had a little bit of an increase, but not much, very minimal. So most counties are our down a little bit which will be interesting going forward.

Price per square foot

We had $144 two years ago, 118 this past year, and at $119 this year. And again, it looks like 144, two years ago was a little bit of the anomaly. We had some interesting stuff kind of going on there, but again, it looks like some of our anomaly number there. This is a general rule of thumb for the counties. Really, it's showing you a trend. This is not something to take gospel of this is. If you multiply this number by your square footage, it would give you your general valuation of your home. And again, if you need an actual evaluation of your home, you got to have a real estate professional. You've got to have someone on our team, you gotta have an appraiser, somebody who actually can come walk the property, you see the neighborhood run, the comps to see the updates you've made, et cetera. You've got to have someone there doing it. This just gives you a general rule of thumb and gives you the trend of what's happening in your county. Take that for what it's worth, but the Zillows of the world and all these different things are just gonna give you just algorithm numbers basically. You got to have someone actually at the property giving you actual data.

Sold

This is the buyer statistic. Really the only buyer stat we have on here. The buyer pool doesn't change all that much unless you have a cataclysmic event like a depression or like a recession. We have not had any of that really lately really over in the last 10 years obviously. We shouldn't see too, too much movement except we have seen some. We had 1,893 two years ago, 1,681 last year and 1,552 this past March. So it has gone down a little bit. It doesn't totally surprise me because again, we've had lower listing inventory overall. So it doesn't surprise me that it's going down a little bit because there just isn't much to choose from. There are people that are leaving the market. There are people that are like it's hard to save right now. Interest rates have been going up, so people have been leaving the market a little bit over the last few months and it's just that time of year. The winters can change things a little bit. Cold winters, more extreme winters can change things a little bit. So it doesn't surprise me that that's gone down a little bit, but it will be interesting to see over the next handful of months what happens with that.

So that is it guys. That's the Oakland County March 2019 Real Estate Market Updates. I really appreciate you joining us today. If you guys have questions, comments, concerns, those of you on the podcast, please go to the YouTube channel or Legacy Group Facebook channel (@legacygroupmi) for both of those and put your questions, comments, concerns in there and we will answer those. We get a lot of messages off of there. I really appreciate it. However, we want to try to help as many people as possible. So put them in the public domain if you feel comfortable enough. And we'll answer those in there and try to help everyone. Appreciate your guys' time and energy more than anything and spending with us the most important asset we have and we will see you on the next one.