October 2018 Real Estate Market Update – Livingston County, Michigan
We have your October 2018 Real Estate Market Update for Livingston County. Let’s jump right into it. We preface every video with a couple of things here. We do the month in arrears and because we have that all that data now, so now we can give you the most up to date information as to what’s going on. All of it’s in our hands now and we’re giving it to you. We have three years of data because we want to see a pattern. If I just gave you 2018 and what was happening this past month, it wouldn’t make any sense. You want to have anything to go by and to compare it to. So as Robert Kiyosaki says, “Numbers tell a story” and that’s exactly what we’re doing. This is the numerical version of the technical analysis. If you’re an investor of any kind, stocks or whatever it may be, you hopefully think about trend lines – an uptrend, a sideways trend or a downtrend. This gives you an idea of what kind of trend, what kind of pattern we are in that way you can make decisions more efficiently for you and your family. So let’s jump right into this.
Days on Market
DOM. A lot of time you see this ADOM, CDOM, DOM, it basically means days on market for the most part. Just think days on market. The average for a home and 60-47-49. We’re going to see a little bit of uptake in some of these numbers. Actually, it’s the first time we’ve really truly seen across the board some upticks in these numbers and it could be a sign of things to come possibly. So we’ll see. We’re gonna keep our eye on it, but we’ve had a trending market going up. Prices going up over the last handful of years and we’re starting to see a little bit of a variance with some of these numbers. Not necessarily price, but some of the inventory and things like that. So we’ll get into that more here.
Active Homes in the Market
This is a one-day off number and it’s a day at the end of the month when we take all the data, but it does give you a pattern. It can show you from year to year at the end of each month what that number looks like. How many active homes are on the market at that time? And again, we had a big dip from ’16 to ’17 and then again it went up about 100 homes across the county since last year. So very interesting. We have some different data kind of coming in now.
Month of inventory
Again, this has gone down, now it’s come back up again. We have not seen that in a number of years either, the month of inventory coming back up. The month of inventory means that the rate homes are selling, how long would it take to sell every last home without any new homes coming on the market. So that gives you an idea and just give you some perspective. Anything seven to plus months is a buyer’s market. Three to six months or basically four to six months is a balanced market basically. And then anything one to three months is a seller’s market. So that gives you an idea of where we’re at right now. It’s still a solid market, obviously. It’s a quick ratio to tell you basically all these numbers together, what they mean, so that way you know exactly what’s going on when you look at that number. You might hear that if you’re listening to national news stations and things like that, you might hear them throw around inventory and months of inventory, stuff like that.
New Homes in the market
This is a month-long number. This is a good number because it shows you how many listings were new that month, how many homes came on the market. This has stayed very even the last couple of Octobers. It has not changed much. This is pretty similar to most other counties right now as well. We’re seeing very similar data this month across the counties so far. And this is, by the way, I feel like a meteorologist sometimes. I don’t know, for whatever reason, I just point like the clouds are going a certain direction or something. But again, good, stable. That’s why we’re not seeing fluctuations to too much other than price. Price has gone up a lot. Price is still going up. Overall, inventory is still down, so the price is still going up. We’ve got a lot of people now coming out, they’ve been renting for a few years, maybe some of the younger people. We’ve had people that are out of their foreclosures and their short sales over the last couple of years and they’re starting to reenter the market. So we’ve had a lot of people entering the market that’s why prices have been rising even though that maybe there’s some more inventory coming out, there’s still a fair amount of buyers coming out as well that maybe hadn’t been in the market before. That’s why we’re still seeing some prices rise. This is really the buyer statistic. Let me preface this as well.
Price per square foot
This is a general rule of thumb. This is a general number across the county. So if you need an actual price analysis in your home, you want to get a true value of your home, you really have to have a real estate professional come in, someone from our team or a real estate appraiser, someone like that who can give you an actual appraisal for your home and tell you what your home is worth and give you that report. This is just a general rule of thumb of accounting. More importantly, it’s the pattern. What kind of trend this is in and where is the market going? That’s what that is truly for.
Sold
Sold is the number of homes that closed in that month. So that’s homes that went under contract. They got accepted offers in August and September and they ended up closing in October. That number is very stable again the past couple October. A good sign doesn’t see any huge fluctuation there. We don’t usually see huge fluctuation in the sold numbers unless there’s a huge catastrophic event like a recession, depression, something like that. The buyer pool does generally stay quite similar. It stays somewhat the same from year to year. As I said, you have some interesting things happened like 10 years ago. You have people and their seven-year windows were up from short sales and stuff like that. They’re coming back into the market over the last year or two. That’s why you’ve seen some of the fluctuations in some of the numbers.
So I hope that kind of gives you some light into where we are in the market right now, especially in Livingston County. Look for our other market updates for the other counties in Metro Detroit. Let us know what questions, comments, concerns you have. If you know anyone in Livingston, if you were in Livingston yourself, please share it with anyone you think we might be able to help them out and we appreciate it. We appreciate your time, energy and watching this because it’s the most important thing we have and we just love giving it to you. I so appreciate you guys more than anything and we look forward to seeing you on the other market updates.