September 2018 Real Estate Market Update – Livingston County, Michigan
What’s going on guys? Brandon here. We have your market update for September 2018 in Livingston County. Let’s jump right into this. I preface every video when we go through this. We have the month previous that way you know the exact updated information. If we started in the middle of the month, you wouldn’t know what’s going on. So we need the end of the month to wrap up. That’s why we go in arrears and we have three years of data because if I just showed you 2018 right here, you wouldn’t have any idea what’s going on. The pattern that the numbers tell the story and that’s why we have the years previous so that we could walk through that and you can see the pattern and what’s going on. So let’s jump right into this.
Livingston County, September 2018. Days on Market is DOM. So we have a decrease by a few days here over the last couple of years. Not a drastic change. Again, that’s just days you’re listing sits in the market on average.
Active Homes on the Market
991 all the way to 923, a little dip last year and kind of back up again a little bit. Not too much change here. You got to take the number of the grain of salt because it’s a one-off number. It’s a one day, at the end of every month basically, whether it’s the 29th, 30th, or 31st. We’re taking a one-day look to see how many active homes on the market. So it doesn’t give us a broad view of what’s going on, but it gives us an idea of what’s going on.
Month of Inventory
MOI. So a balanced market is about four to six months of inventory and anything above that – 8, 10, 12, 15 is a buyer’s market. We saw that 10 years ago in ’09, ’10, ’11. We have seen in a lot of counties, one month of inventory, two months of inventory right now in Oakland County, Genesee County, areas like that. Livingston has in September, we have not seen that. We’ve seen three months of inventory and we’ve seen four months actually this past September, so a little more balanced and you might’ve noticed that if you’re out buying and selling home a little more balanced market. A buyer sets a little more time to make offers on homes, kind of do what they wanted to do. Sellers are probably a little bit more anxious, a little bit more than they are used to this last year or so and the market wasn’t quite as hot. There’s a number of reasons because of that. We have elections coming up. We have a lot of heated, geopolitical and domestic issues going on right now and that uncertainty really rattles the markets and we have interest rates rising. So some big, big factors at play that are really affecting the real estate market.
New Homes on the Market
These are new homes that came on, so this isn’t even better number than the actives. New homes that got listed in this month and again, fairly similar, a little dip last year, but back up again this year. So a pretty good month and that’s why we see four here. MOI is how long would it take every last home to sell if no new homes came on the market selling at the pace they’re selling. So that’s what that number is and that’s why we can kind of gauge that. It’s kind of a culmination of the ratio of all these numbers.
Price per Square Foot
This is a countywide number, so you don’t want to take with a grain of salt. You don’t want to just say, “Oh my home,” and you take this number $142 a square foot and you can multiply that by your square footage and get about what your home will be worth in that county. So if you want a true valuation, you got to have a real estate team. You got to have an appraiser or a real estate professional come to look at your home and give you an actual evaluation. This is a countywide number so it takes in all areas of your county and some might be good, some might be bad. You have to take all those into consideration and that’s just to give you a general gauge of what’s going on.
Sold
So the last one here is sold and sold is a number – kind of a buyer number if you will, and that is the number of properties that have been sold. Again we can see a little dip here over the last couple of years and frankly it’s because before these months when homes are going under contract and then this is when they close so that sold number’s when they close actually. So it could be 30 to 60 days before that they went under contract so we have a lot fewer homes the market as because in previous months we had a lot less inventory. So that’s why you’re seeing this number lower. But I would expect to see since this number is now rising, the ratio is going up. There are more homes entering the market. I would expect this number to maybe go down a few dollars in the months coming forward here and then I would expect that to possibly rise a little bit as well. So hopefully selling some more homes than usual. So a balanced market is good, we like balanced markets, everyone likes balanced markets in the end. Sellers might not like them as much but balanced markets kind of keep everything going and keep everything rolling smoothly.
So that is the update for Livingston County in September 2018. I appreciate you guys more than anything and in watching and paying attention to this and getting the info that you really frankly aren’t getting anywhere else. We’ve been doing this for three years, four years and I have yet to see other people consistently over the last three or four years put out this information. This is from the MLS, from the actual Multiple Listing Service. So it is the actual data that the realtors use to do anything and give you market stats and list homes. This is where everything is listed and everything comes from. Zillow, realtor.com, all those sites are all fed from the MLS. They’re all fed from this. So this is why this is super important. So I appreciate you guys more than anything and we look forward to seeing you in the other market updates.