The fourth-quarter real estate market statistics were released recently by the Multiple Listing Service of Central Oregon. What do they tell us? Well, looking at Central Oregon as a whole, sales are down a bit, days on market are down quite a bit –- and prices are up. Again.
Lack of inventory helps explain those three key stats: With fewer options to choose from, ready-to-relocate buyers are more willing to go to bat for a property, via multiple-offer bidding wars — which helps drive prices up. Combine higher sales prices with fewer options for buyers, and you see fewer sales. Meanwhile, extremely low inventory means fewer days on market – all those circling buyers just waiting for the right home are snapping up the best new listings as soon as they hit the MLS.
While it’s great to look at the big picture, real estate is a decidedly localized industry. So, not surprisingly, within Central Oregon the trends for the last quarter of 2014 fluctuate from community to community. Bend’s Single Family Residential listings, for example, saw a negligible drop in the number of sales (-.88 percent), while Sisters’ Residential with Acreage sales saw a sizable drop (-20.48 percent) and Redmond’s Single Family Residential listings saw a sizable increase –- 16.41 percent.
Most Central Oregon markets saw a fairly dramatic drop in the number of days that a home was on the market: a 29.35 percent decrease for Sisters Single Family Residential listings, a 19.79 percent decrease for Redmond’s Residential with Acreage listings. However, the days on market for Bend’s Single Family Residential listings increased 4.46 percent.
Then there’s price. Oh, yeah. That. No doubt, the price of a home for sale in Central Oregon is on the rise –- and in some markets, pretty substantially (the sales price for Bend Residential with Acreage listings was up 13.58 percent; for Redmond’s Single Family Residential listings, it was up 10.28 percent. However, the two Sisters markets actually saw a slight decrease: the sales price for Single Family Residential listings was down 8.51 percent, while the sales price for Residential With Acreage listings was down 1.05 percent.
About the Charts
For those who want to study the market by the numbers, the charts below detail the past five years’ fourth-quarter activity for Bend, Sisters and Redmond (my primary coverage areas). I often represent buyers purchasing rural acreage — especially horse properties — so I track both Single Family Residential (SFR) trends and Residential with Acreage (RW) trends.
In the charts, I focused on three of the main categories that reflect the state of the market: (1.) total number of homes sold; (2) Average sales amount; and (3.) Days on market. Checking out these charts will give you a quick overview of what’s been happening in the market.
Fourth Quarter Real Estate Market Statistics – 2014
How Does the Current Market Compare to the Peak?
For those of you who remember Central Oregon’s recent boomtown days (between 2005 and 2007), here’s another chart that’s worth note: It compares the fourth-quarter sales to that of the peak.
What it shows is that, although we are well on the road to recovery from the 2008 recession –- prices have risen notably in the past two years and the available inventory of distressed properties has all but disappeared –- there are still some significant differences. Most importantly, the prices of homes sold is still anywhere from 20 to 50 percent lower than during the peak. (It’s still hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that the average sales amount of a home on acreage in Sisters during 2007 was $839,103!)
About the Author
Lisa Broadwater, GRI, CDPE, is a Central Oregon-based real estate professional who specializes in listing and selling homes, especially in Sisters, Tumalo, Bend and Redmond.