Tag Archives: ReMax Firehouse

Speed of January Sales Felt More Like Spring Selling Season

Posted on by
Reply

February 2018 RE/MAX National Housing Report on MLS Data from 53 Metro Areas

Denver, CO – Feb. 16, 2018 (PRNewswire) The record speed of January home sales may signal that buyers aren’t waiting around for the typical spring selling season to begin. Despite home sales being down 2.8% year-over-year, the February RE/MAX National Housing Report shows homes sold in a mere 60 days last month, marking the fewest Days on Market of any January in the nine-year history of the report. To access the housing report infographic, visit: https://rem.ax/2GdTVcL.

Remax Logo

Days on Market typically decline each month leading into the heart of the spring and summer buying season in July and start increasing monthly as fall progresses into winter.

“We recently saw the groundhog predict six more weeks of winter, but January housing numbers are telling a different story,” said RE/MAX CEO Adam Contos. “It looks like the spring selling season may have arrived early because home buyers are not slowing down. The speed of this market is on pace with what we saw in the prime of the 2017 selling season.”

The Median Sales Price of $224,000 also set a January record — up 6.7% year-over-year. Out of 53 markets, 51 posted gains, marking January as the 22nd consecutive month of year-over-year price increases dating back to April 2016.

Closed Transactions

Of the 53 metro areas surveyed in January 2018, the overall average number of home sales decreased 27.4% compared to December 2017 and decreased 2.8% compared to January 2017. Twenty of the 53 metro areas experienced an increase in sales year-over-year including, Milwaukee, WI, +13.6%, Albuquerque, NM, +12.8%, Kansas City, MO, +12.5%, and Boise, ID, +12%.

Median Sales Price – Median of 53 metro median prices

In January 2018, the median of all 53 metro Median Sales Prices was $224,000, down 4.7% from December 2017 but up 6.7% from January 2017. Billings, MT, was the only metro area to see a year-over-year decrease in Median Sales Price at -6.4%. Eleven metro areas increased year-over-year by double-digit percentages, with the largest increases seen in Boise, ID, +18.7%, Las Vegas, NV, +16.2%, San Francisco, CA, +14% and Orlando, FL, +13.8%.

Days on Market – Average of 53 metro areas

The average Days on Market for homes sold in January 2018 was 60, up three days from the average in December 2017, and down six days from the January 2017 average. The metro areas with the lowest Days on Market were San Francisco, CA, at 31, Omaha, NE, at 34 and Nashville, TN at 36. The highest Days on Market averages were in Augusta, ME, at 109, Chicago, IL, at 96 and Hartford, CT, at 93. Days on Market is the number of days between when a home is first listed in an MLS and a sales contract is signed.

Months Supply of Inventory – Average of 53 metro areas

The number of homes for sale in January 2018 was down 4.8% from December 2017, and down 14.8% from January 2017. Based on the rate of home sales in December, the Months Supply of Inventory decreased to 3.4 from December 2017 at 3.7, as well as decreased compared to January 2017 at 3.8. A 6.0-months supply indicates a market balanced equally between buyers and sellers. In January 2018, 49 of the 53 metro areas surveyed reported a months supply at or less than 6.0, which is typically considered a seller’s market. The metro areas that saw a months supply above 6.0, which is typically considered a buyer’s market, were Birmingham, AL, at 8.2, Augusta, ME, at 7.5, Miami, FL, at 7.1 and New Orleans, LA, at 6.8. The markets with the lowest Months Supply of Inventory continued to be in the west with Denver, CO, San Francisco, CA and Seattle, WA at 1.1.

Contact

For specific data in this report or to request an interview, please contact newsroom@remax.com.

About the RE/MAX Network:

RE/MAX was founded in 1973 by Dave and Gail Liniger, with an innovative, entrepreneurial culture affording its agents and franchisees the flexibility to operate their businesses with great independence. Over 115,000 agents provide RE/MAX a global reach of more than 100 countries and territories. Nobody sells more real estate than RE/MAX, when measured by residential transaction sides. RE/MAX, LLC, one of the world’s leading franchisors of real estate brokerage services, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of RMCO, LLC, which is controlled and managed by RE/MAX Holdings, Inc. (NYSE: RMAX). With a passion for the communities in which its agents live and work, RE/MAX is proud to have raised more than $157 million for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals® and other charities. For more information about RE/MAX, to search home listings or find an agent in your community, please visit www.remax.com. For the latest news about RE/MAX, please visit www.remax.com/newsroom.

Description

The RE/MAX National Housing Report is distributed each month on or about the 15th. The first Report was distributed in August 2008. The Report is based on MLS data in approximately 53 metropolitan areas, includes all residential property types, and is not annualized. For maximum representation, many of the largest metro areas in the country are represented, and an attempt is made to include at least one metro from each state. Metro area definitions include the specific counties established by the U.S. Government’s Office of Management and Budget, with some exceptions.

Definitions

Transactions are the total number of closed residential transactions during the given month. Months Supply of Inventory is the total number of residential properties listed for sale at the end of the month (current inventory) divided by the number of sales contracts signed (pended) during the month. Where “pended” data is unavailable, this calculation is made using closed transactions. Days on Market is the number of days that pass from the time a property is listed until the property goes under contract for all residential properties sold during the month. Median Sales Price is the median of the median sales prices in each of the metro areas included in the survey.

MLS data is provided by contracted data aggregators, RE/MAX brokerages and regional offices. While MLS data is believed to be accurate, it cannot be guaranteed. MLS data is constantly being updated, making any analysis a snapshot at a particular time. Every month the RE/MAX National Housing Report re-calculates the previous period’s data to ensure accuracy over time. All raw data remains the intellectual property of each local MLS organization.

AgencyLogic Client Featured in the Baltimore Sun

Posted on by
Reply

Slow realty market goes high-tech
Brokers and agents rush to embrace trendy tools

brendanbaltsun3.jpg

By Jamie Smith Hopkins
Sun reporter
October 31, 2007

It has its own Web site. A four-minute publicity video. A round-the-clock advertising campaign on AM radio.

Listen, world: This house on 36th Street is FOR SALE.

As homes stay on the market longer and longer, with more and more of them for buyers to choose from, a growing number of agents aren’t merely getting property details into the Realtor multiple-listing system and hoping for the best. All the technological advances made during the housing boom years – when a low-tech “for sale” sign seemed to be enough – are really being put to use now.

A survey released this month found that agents are rushing to try blogs – online journals – and social-networking sites such as Facebook for advertising purposes. Coldwell Banker Real Estate announced in March that it had opened an office in Second Life, the online “virtual world.” There are firms that send listing information to prospective buyers’ cell phones and give the agent a heads-up.

How well these tactics work is an open question. But that’s almost beside the point.

“Marketing these days seems to be, ‘Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks,'” said Brendan Cooke, an associate broker with ReMax Firehouse in Baltimore. “You’re going to start seeing all sorts of things cropping up to get people into a house.”

Cooke, who represents the sellers of that 36th Street home in Baltimore’s Ednor Gardens neighborhood, created a Web site with an address that matches the house’s, www.1126east36th.com. He added 59 photos. He shot video, edited it on his computer (complete with soundtrack) and uploaded it to YouTube.

And that round-the-clock radio campaign? You can hear it if you stop your car near the place and tune to 1670 AM as the “Talking House” sign in the yard suggests, a feat made possible by a small transmitter placed in the house.

Not everything agents are trying is new – Talking House, produced by an Illinois firm, has been around for years – but there’s a clear path toward higher-tech.

One in five agents and brokers say they have a blog, and one out of four use social-networking sites, according to a real estate advertising survey released this month by Florida-based Classified Intelligence and Realty Times. Last year, neither strategy even registered on the survey, Classified Intelligence said.

Video walk-throughs of homes are also more common – in part thanks to YouTube, which makes it easier to upload the finished product and put it on other sites. YouTube launched in 2005, the last year of the housing boom.

“The barriers to entry in terms of producing and distributing video are much, much lower these days,” said Joel Burslem, founder of the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog (www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com). Blogging also has “gotten to the point where it’s really quite simple. … I think it’s worth experimenting with all of this stuff because, at the end of the day, you want to make sure that property moves.”

It’s not just Realtors. Homeowners are experimenting, too.

“We’re finding many of our customers are doing the same type of innovative marketing approaches,” said Eric Mangan, a spokesman for ForSaleByOwner.com, which helps homeowners market their properties.

Peter M. Zollman, principal and founder of Classified Intelligence, predicts a big rise next year in the use of mobile technology for real estate sales. Already, several companies offer agents a telephone number to which prospective buyers can text-message for details about specific homes – a way for agents to pump information to potential customers who are trolling neighborhoods and are away from their computers.

Exton, Pa.-based CellSigns Inc. charges agents about $5 a month per home for such a service, which assigns each home a code that the agent can put on for-sale signs or advertisements. Prospective buyers enter the code for details. If they tell the system they want to talk to the agent or schedule a showing, it shoots their contact details to the Realtor. Sales of the system are up more than 150 percent from last year, said Dave Geipel, president of the company.

He credits the surge to good timing. Adults have embraced text messaging just as agents “are pulling out all the stops to ensure that that property sells,” he said.

Overall, though, Realtors are frustrated by their efforts – no matter how high-tech. Nearly 60 percent of the agents and brokers in the recent survey said the time and money they’ve put into their Web sites haven’t paid off as well as they’d hoped, Classified Intelligence reported. About 40 percent said they are “overwhelmed” by the multitude of marketing choices they have now.

What they said works best? Word-of-mouth and networking – the offline variety.

It can be difficult to make one voice stand out amid the Net noise, said Amna Kirmani, a marketing professor at the University of Maryland. But the upside is the minimal cost, she said.

Lenn Harley, broker with Rockville-based Homefinders.com, which works with buyers, believes in the power of the Internet, the source of all her business.

But she’s skeptical about much of the bells-and-whistles marketing that agents do. She thinks one-home-only Web sites, Talking Houses and the like won’t do much to attract buyers.

“Those are things that listing agents do to impress their sellers,” Harley said.

It impressed Mark Blackmon, one of Cooke’s clients. That’s because Blackmon has a background in marketing and thought the ideas made sense – and because his home in the Belvedere Square area sold in 10 days for its full asking price of $349,000.

“Having that dedicated Web site is, I think, really what ultimately helped us sell that house so quickly,” said Blackmon, who got the contract in June and moved to Indiana for a new job.

Polly Greene, the buyer, wasn’t even considering that area. She had planned to move her family from Silver Spring to Mount Washington before her agent sent her the link to the video on that site. Realtor Lucy Volz found it on the advertising site Craigslist.

“We watched it multiple times and talked about where we’d put things – we kind of fell in love with the house before we even walked in the door, and the video made that happen,” said Greene, who works for a consulting firm. “If it had just been three or four flat photos, it might not have piqued our interest.”

Copyright © 2007, The Baltimore Sun