Same song, different verse

Hits: 23

Take a quick look at the most recently updated statistics on this blog site and tell me, honestly, if you think sales units would be down if there was a selection of homes for buyers looking under $500,000. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

It is not pleasant to report that sales are down, but they are. They are down because there are precious few homes for sale for qualified buyers under that half million price point. That happens to be the price range threshold I use to set up my reports: Under 500K, then 500K to 1.0 million etc… If one wanted to search more narrowly, say between 300K and 400K, the numbers could be striking and actually sad.

There are plenty of market forces at work in Santa Fe residential real estate, including the dimensional shift into higher priced homes. Take for example the First Quarter Sales report attached and available for you to view by clicking in the margin. In the 15 years of reporting, home sales above $1 million have risen from single digits for the quarter, to five and six times that lately. This shows the effect of appreciation and the ever-increasing average and median home sales prices. Another way to view the shift is comparing the average sales price for a home in Santa Fe city and county for the two years 2001 and 2018… $295,674 then and $493,715 for 2018.

This is graphic evidence that the increasing average prices continue to hurt the first time home buyer and lay waste to reasonable market conditions in that lowest price range of under $500K.

How about comparing the # of months of inventory, on average, that our market offers to potential buyers, say as recently as 2009 compared to 2019. Then it was in excess of 13 months to sell a home; now it is barely over 2 months. do you think we could sell another 100 homes a year in that lower price range? How about another 250 homes? I suspect yes we could as there seems to be demand sufficient to accomplish that increase.

All is not lost for home buyers in Santa Fe. Their choices are limited and some say the quality inventory is gone in a flash, so one must be ready to move quickly with a solid written offer and be prepared to compete with other buyers.

I remember a time when a buyer customer I was showing homes to was upset because a new listing popped up overnight and I did not know about it to arrange for her to see it. Never mind that the market was much more saturated then and it would likely have been on the market for several months. It was not even a finished home so a large portion of the buyers eligible or interested would not have been able to secure a mortgage on an unfinished home. This buyer could due to the family trust having the ability to set him/her up with mortgage debt he/she automatically qualified for due to last name, DNA and being in good standing with the estate attorney in charge. Lucky me I was able to help with the sale. Lucky buyer that the home could be shown the first day it was on the market. We were the first to see it and of course the first to submit an offer.

Your favorite blogger will return soon with more analysis of what is going on in Santa Fe real estate. Stay woke!

Posted in Home Values, Santa Fe, Santa Fe area real estate, Statistical Data - Santa Fe real estate market and tagged , , .

The writer is a 68 year-old young man engaged as an active REALTOR (associate broker) with Keller Williams, in real estate sales and management in the Santa Fe NM market area. My career has been in and around the real estate industry for more than 35 years, ranging from mortgage lending (interim, commercial, residential); residential property management and leasing; shopping center development and leasing; real estate sales; sales training; title insurance as an executive and an escrow officer; various management positions; consulting and other related activities. That plus a bunch of banking experience including our family-owned Bank of Santa Fe in the 1980s. Where has the time gone?
My background means you have my working knowledge of the entire transaction process at your disposal. That comes with honesty and no bullshit.