Steiner Ranch Market Update 2/15/2021
Since I last reported a month ago, we have seen LOTS of multiple offer situations driving prices up well over list price. This data can be hard to interpret though because surprisingly, homes are still being underpriced! This is creating a lot of frustration for buyers.
A question I keep hearing is “How are some properties being under-priced while others aren’t when Realtors have the same data to look at to determine pricing?” The answer is simple – the market is moving so fast right now that listing agents can not afford to wait 30-45 days until closing to know what a property sold for when the sold price is published at closing. So the agents who are in the trenches working with buyers every day have more data to work with. They know what pending properties went for because they either have them under contract with their buyer or they wrote an offer on it and know what price it went over. It is more important than ever to use a hyper-local agent!
At the end of January, we saw once again normal inventory with increased buyers. We had 26 new listings vs. 28 in 2020 and 25 in 2019.
But the “months of inventory” metric went way down! Remember, this is the number of listings (supply) relative to the number of homes being purchased at that time. The result indicates the number of months it would take to sell all properties currently for sale at the average monthly sales pace. We had only .6 months of inventory available this January vs. 2.9 in 2020, 4.7 in 2019 and 5.4 in 2018! So, if the number of listings stayed about the same and the months of inventory decreased by approx. 80%, that means we had a whole lot more buyers!!
The most offers I’ve heard of in Steiner Ranch lately was 27. The list price to sales price ratios are obviously going up but I caution buyers against using only this info without talking to an agent who intimately understands the Steiner Ranch market. As I stated in the beginning, lots of homes are being underpriced by agents who have NO idea what’s going on in our market. So that ratio is obviousluy going to be a LOT higher than a properly priced home. The sale price to original list price ratio for January was 101.3% but I can promise you this will skyrocket in February. In the last 2 weeks, 3 listings under $600,000 have closed and the average sale price to list price ratio is a whopping 121%!
There are a lot of sellers who want to sell but are not putting their homes on the market because there’s nowhere for them to move to. The perfect sellers right now are investors who own rental property because this is not a concern. It will be interesting to see what this does to our rental market as we start to see former rental properties converted to owner-occupied. The rental prices in Steiner Ranch have not risen as much as home prices in recent years. Maybe we will start to see them catch up. You can follow my rental property stats here.
See my 2020 Year end market recap here.
