Mark's Market Update - Inventory and Sales Price 2018 Overview

Welcome to another edition of Mark's Market Update. We're into 2019 and as you can see the weather is really cold out here, the lake is frozen and we're hoping to see a thaw in home sales going into 2019. The national news just reported that December of 2018 homes sales, fell to the lowest level since November 2015. We saw a major softening of sales in December 2018. With that said, I would like to summarize the St Louis County & St Charles County Market for the entire year of 2018. What Happened? We continually talked about Inventory Levels, Interest Rates and Prices. We saw that inventory levels in St Louis County were lower than the previous year by about 2.5%. However, we did see an increase in the Median Price by 5%. So, re: supply and demand, we saw a weakness in supply, which was great news for Sellers, as prices rose. In the first half of the year, we saw major weakness in inventory and a significant rise in prices, which as the year went on, we saw a softening. In addition, there was a lot of volatility in Interest Rates, fluctuating from 4% all the way up to 5 1/4 - 5 1/2% and now good news for buyers, as they are down to about 4 1/2%. Now in St Charles County, what happened? We saw an even greater weakness in Inventory than we did in St Louis County. Inventory and closed sales were down over 2 1/2 %. Good news again for Sellers, was prices were up 4.7%. Very similar to St Louis County, where we saw the prices increase and the weakness in inventory, significantly in the first half of 2018. We saw those both weaken as the year went on in 2018. Going in to 2019, we've seen a significant continued softening. However, it all depends what's going to happen to inventory levels, as we are going to have to pay significant interest in inventory levels going into Spring. Right now on a cold day like today, we're not seeing significant increases in inventory. Looking into the Spring Market we're really going to have to identify what happens to inventory levels and correspondingly what happens to prices.

If you have any questions about buying, selling, investing, the value of your home, homes that are on the market or coming soon, don't hesitate to call, email or text.

Stay Warm, any Questions Let Us Know! See our latest selling option: www.stlrocketlisting.com 

Start your buying or selling experience here with the Gellman Team for all St. Louis homes for sale and real estate.