May, 2012 marks the end of the housing recession in Sussex County!!! Single Family Home (SFH) closings came in at 221. I had to go back to August of 2007 to find a single month with closings over 200 SFH properties. Just to put things into perspective, the AVERAGE number of monthly closings in all of 2006 were 228. More good news, the average selling price in May jumped to $359,923. That's up from under $300K in January through April. The YTD average is now up to just over $300K to $301,345. So beach properties are starting to participate in the upturn in activity. Sellers took a little more of a beating on price however getting only 91.8% of their asking price (asking price at time of contract). That's down from a high of 93.7% in April. More good news, inventory came down in May to 2,757 SFH properties bringing the absorption rate (average monthly sales divided by inventory) to a YTD low of 17.6 months. Inventory is still higher than the year end 2011 by 4.3%. More good news, SFH properties under contract waiting to close went up from 532 at the end of April to 544 at the end of May. This means we're going to have another block buster month of closings in June. So that brings us to 130% YTD vs. the same period last year in terms of closings. It's all good news. More good news, interest rates came down even further to 3.5% on a 30 year fixed for a primary home and as low as 2.675% for a 7 year adjustable mortgage. That's almost free money!! Investors are having a field day.
The Condo/Townhouse (C/T) news is even better. Closings are up 36.4% YTD vs. last year same period. There were 100 reported closings in May (78.6% more than May of 2011), way above the 67 YTD average. Inventory fell to a multi year low of just 13.7 months supply or 903 listings. Unfortunately, properties under contract dropped as well to only 151 units so June will probably not be so robust as May was in terms of closings. The average selling price of a C/T was $318,020, well above the YTD average of $295,199. Sellers got 94.7% of their asking price which is pretty good. Hopefully we're on our way to a housing recovery in Sussex County.
Call us for details or a free estimate of your home's worth in today's market if you're not already working with a real estate professional.
As always, if you have any questions or want more information regarding this material please contact me directly by phone or email. Remember, these figures are calculated daily through my analysis of the Sussex County MLS and are totally dependant on the accuracy thereof. Many Builders do not report sales to this MLS nor do For Sale By Owners. Also, our MLS service allows some other Counties to input data to ours and I try hard to make sure those numbers don't get into my analysis. Actual closing dates may not coincide with mine exactly as some agents take longer than others to load closings into the MLS. I report daily so my cut off is the last day of the month/year. If they report several days later, it will show up in my data for the next month/year. This analysis is intended to be used directionally, not literally.
