Tag Archives: Colorado Springs Real Estate

The Market Peak, May 2013

Days on market continues to plummet and months of inventory is less than 3.5 months in half of our major MLS areas right now.

The Market Peak: First Quarter 2013 by Individual MLS AREAS

Here is a review (at times staggering) of the price trends for the 8 MLS areas we most frequently list and sell in. Values are compared to First Quarter 2012.

The Market Peak: First Quarter 2013

In April 2006, a very bored manager of a little real estate outpost on Library Lane (yes, that is the street name) decided to stick his toe back into the kiddie pool of real estate. Between reviewing contracts and making sure sellers were signing Addendum A’s, this agent went looking at the data, remembering the puzzling and vexing questions of his client, Chandra Narumanchi, who, the previous year, had the audacity to demand to know the months of inventory in his neighborhood, and what the probability of his house selling might be.

This manager made a fateful and foolish decision. He embraced his inner nerd. He began churning out data. He began to wax eloquently (and sometimes, quite opinionatedly) about the market and it’s trends. He sent out a two page SEND-ALL email written in Word with a mess of numbers. He printed it off and distributed it at a company sales meeting. He called it “The Stat Pack.”

That month, April 2006, was also a fateful month in local real estate. It was the same month that the real estate market tipped from the gonzo insanity of “buy know or be priced out forever” (a quote from former NAR lead economist David Lereah, author of 2005′s fateful “Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust“). That single month, asking prices rose, sales prices mysteriously dipped, inventory soared and so did interest rates. By the end of June, there were 1200+ more listings for sale than the same time the year before. This Stat Pack thing just happened to launch at the same moment that the market tipped.

The Stat Pack has officially been retired. There are three reasons. The first is that my old (yes, the geek and the manager and the author are all one in the same. Back to first person singular) brokerage that I left three years ago insists on producing a document of the same name. The second is that documents suck and video, even bad video like mine, is better. The third is that the market has changed. We are now at a 13 year low in inventory. We are at the lowest supply of housing after first quarter in MLS history (3.5 months to sell through all of it). We are at the highest rate of sale in 6 years. And the house money of 3.6% interest rates is still out there.

Anything decent will not only be gone by Monday, but will have a bidding war take it out. Here are the cold hard facts in moving graphic form, narrated by yours truly:

 

The Stat Pack, February 2013, Part 1: General Data

Jay Epperson’s Pick Your Neighbor Campaign: 10% appreciation in six months

My buddy Jay Epperson with Re/Max Cherry Creek in Denver is working a “Pick Your Neighbor” Campaign with his database and farm, which means the good folks of Stapleton and east Denver are being enlisted to help find homes for sale.

Think back two years ago, and would you have thought the market would come to this? In an era of 12-year low inventory and even national pending sales that are approaching what they were in the peak of the First-Time Buyer Tax Stimulus, the market is seeing a major-league squeeze. These are just my metrics, but the last five contracts I’ve written, either listing or buy side, have all involved properties on the market less than 48 hours.

Less than 48 hours.

Jay sent me a referral and I did a market analysis for this seller last August. Now they’re ready to go.

Take a look in the Buying Pattern difference between 2011 and 2012. I could tell last August the market was flipping upward, but I didn’t anticipate that prices would rise 10%… in just six months.

A lot sold in 2011, but note the gravity for sales around $170,000

A lot sold in 2011, but note the gravity for sales around $170,000

Fewer homes sold in 2012, and the squeeze drove prices up: look how many around $200,000

Fewer homes sold in 2012, and the squeeze drove prices up: look how many around $200,000

Oh yeah, average market time was cut in half year over year and within that market time, five of the 8 sales last year sold in less than 51 days, or 1/3rd of the average homes were taking to sell-thru in 2011.

Six months, $20K in appreciation.

This will be fun to explain to the appraiser.

 

The Stat Pack, February Part 3: Neighborhood of the Month, Kissing Camels

The Stat Pack, January 2013: What’s Squeezing the Market?

We don’t believe in silver bullets. It’s why cable news doesn’t work well for us. Things don’t get easily distilled down into one minute 15 second soundbites of information.

We also believe that to really understand something, you have to do two things:
1.) Have a regular practice, and in real estate market reports, that means a somewhat religious consistency to doing the same data each and every month. It’s in exercises like these that patterns are best seen and understood.
2.) Thoughtful analysis comes from good questions. There are such things as dumb questions. But a bigger problem is taking things at face value. Prices are up. Supply is down. Demand is up. Contracts are up a lot. Well… why is all that happening?

As we change The Stat Pack this year into a blog format, this is our monthly second installment, on the theme of, “why’s that happening?” This month: What’s Squeezing the Market?

The Stat Pack, January 2013

Greenshoots 2013: Black Forest Luxury Market

Yesterday we completed a report on the Tri-Lakes Market and indicated that we planned on excluding High Forest Ranch from that analysis because it was a more direct competitor with stretches of Black Forest District 20 to the south. High Forest is a gated neighborhood with 2+ acre lots in the trees on the very souther edge of Lewis-Palmer District 38; we are making the subjective call that the proximity to District 20 neighborhoods like Cathedral Pines, Abert Estates, New Breed Ranch, Bridle Bit and unincorporated stretches of El Paso County up roads like Peregrine and Holmes is more comparable than District 38 neighborhoods like Bent Tree or King’s Deer.

The expectation that these areas would have more inventory, sell slower, and have a lower probability of sale than other markets was proven correct. Surprisingly, the best selling neighborhood classification was Black Forest away from Shoup and Highway 83; this is the least defined and largest geographic area that we mapped, and it had the highest rate of sale in 2012, primarily because 81% of the market was between $500,000 and $600,000. High Forest Ranch had an over $700,000 average selling price in 2012, and Cathedral Pines was just shy of a million. So if there are surprises, it’s that this super-high-end market has less than a year’s worth of inventory to sell through right now, and in some cases, six to eight months of available product.

One last note: Cathedral Pines had 7 MLS recorded sales. This is a lower number, especially when three times as many homes registered as failed-to-sell in 2012. However… there were 10 land sales in 2012, a significant number. The story of reselling a luxury home today is the direct competition with building new. Buyers of land in Cathedral Pines in 2012 sometimes paid $0.30 on the dollar for their lot compared to prices paid in 2005 to 2007.

High Forest Ranch

High Forest Ranch Neighborhood Patterns High Forest Ranch Scattergram High Forest Ranch Buying Patterns High Forest Ranch Time to Sell

Cathedral Pines

Cathedral Pines Neighborhood Patterns Cathedral Pines Scattergram Cathedral Pines Buying Patterns Cathedral Pines Time to Sell

Around Cathedral Pines (Bridle Bit, Abert Estates, New Breed Ranch and unincorporated El Paso County around Shoup, east to Holmest)

Around Cathedral Pines Neighborhood Patterns Around Cathedral Pines Scattergram Around Cathedral Pines Buying Pattern Around Cathedral Pines Time to Sell

Black Forest acreage over $500,000 in District 20 (north of Cathedral Pines and east of Holmes).

Black Forest D20 away from Shoup and 83 Neighborhood Patterns Black Forest D20 away from Shoup and 83 Scattergram Black Forest D20 away from Shoup and 83 Buying Patterns Black Forest D20 away from Shoup and 83 time to sell

 

Some MLS Marketwide baselines… Probability of sale last year for the entire MLS was 63.8%. That was the highest probability since 2005. These graphs sometimes reflect mostly lower numbers, but that is because the software counts under contract properties as still “active”. In essence, these are contracts, and in certain cases, we notated what happens to months of inventory and probability of sale if you “count the contracts” that are there at the start of the year. Saying that, for the most part, Northgate inventories are low carrying over into 2013, but there are not a lot of under contracts in these neighorhoods outside of Flying Horse.

If you would like any of these slides emailed to you for specific information, hit me up at Benjamin@BenjaminDay.com. Yes, we realize that they read a little small, but we’re preciously attached to our WordPress format, so, sorry.

The software used to create these graphs is from http://www.Focus1st.com and we used a date range of January 1, 2012 to January 11/14, 2013 for all of the searches, doing as many as possible on two different business days to get a competitive comparison for a single snapshot in time.

Disclaimer timeBenjamin Day composed this blog post and is solely responsible for it’s content. This information reflects data and opinion of  real estate licensee in The State of Colorado. Based on information from the Pikes Peak REALTOR Services Corp. (“RSC”), for the period January 1, 2012 through January 21, 2013 .  RSC does not guarantee or is in any way responsible for its accuracy.  Data maintained by RSC may not reflect all real estate activity in the market.

 

 

Green Shoots: Northwest District 11 Analysis

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How to Read these:

Neighborhood Patterns: There are FIVE graphs, Odds of a Home Selling, Time to Sell 2012, and Buying Patterns 2012. We then supplemented these with comparisons to 2011 for both Mountain Shadows and Oak Valley Ranch. Mountain Shadows was notably impacted by the Waldo Canyon Fire with 346 homes lost to the fire. Oak Valley Ranch had the fire burn all around it’s borders, but no houses were burned. Initial guesses were that this market would be severely impacted in value. To date, that has not been the case. This has always been a seasonal market, and that was confirmed in 2012 with the highest prices generally paid June through October. The historic event to date has shown zero negative impact on pricing.

On the note of the Waldo Canyon Fire, the probability of sale in Mountain Shadows requires some deeper analysis than these visual graphs reveal. The rate of “failed-to-sell” listings is significant in Mountain Shadows and therefore the expressed probability of sale is less than 50%. But what must also be considered is that the available inventory, both today and at the time of the fire, has been historically low, and therefore a figure like “months of supply” is low, at 4.7 months at end of year, 2012.

Scattergram: something we actively look for in measuring “a good buy” is if a home is selling at near the average price, the median price, and whether or not there is a significant variance in top to bottom prices per square footage. Appraisers like neighborhoods where all the homes hug the trendline forecasting predictable values. WE LIKE neighborhoods that have prices all over the place. Many of our buyers are looking for a “good buy” and one way to measure that is to find a neighborhood with a large variance in prices. Pinon Valley is somewhat predictable in it’s pricing structure, but has multiple markets right alongside one another, with prices under $200,000, $200,000 to $225,000, $225,000 to $275,000, and then an over $300,000 market. Mountain Shadows has prices all over the place due to generations of construction and size of lot. That’s price elasticity.

These graphs also allow consumers to compare neighborhoods. Pinon Valley and Oak Valley Ranch are historically competitive, but the way pricing breaks out in Pinon Valley is more in clusters of like properties, while Oak Valley Ranch had more notable high dollar per square foot sales in 2012.

Some baselines… Probability of sale last year for the entire MLS was 63.8%. That was the highest probability since 2005. These graphs reflect mostly lower numbers, but that is because the software counts under contract properties as still “active”. In essence, these are contracts, and in certain cases, we notated what happens to months of inventory and probability of sale if you “count the contracts” that are there at the start of the year. Saying that, Pinon Valley and Oak Valley Ranch returned some of the most exceptional probabilities of sale in Colorado Springs in 2012.

If you would like any of these slides emailed to you for specific information, hit me up at Benjamin@BenjaminDay.com. Yes, we realize that they read a little small, but we’re preciously attached to our WordPress format, so, sorry.

The software used to create these graphs is from http://www.Focus1st.com and we used a date range of January 1, 2012 to January 11/14, 2013 for all of the searches, doing as many as possible on two different business days to get a competitive comparison for a single snapshot in time.

Disclaimer timeBenjamin Day composed this blog post and is solely responsible for it’s content. This information reflects data and opinion of  real estate licensee in The State of Colorado. Based on information from the Pikes Peak REALTOR Services Corp. (“RSC”), for the period January 1, 2012 through January 14, 2013 .  RSC does not guarantee or is in any way responsible for its accuracy.  Data maintained by RSC may not reflect all real estate activity in the market.