DATA SHOWS BLACK HILLS REAL ESTATE WAY UP, PAST SIX MONTHS

This is hard data from actual sales records. Draw your own conclusions.

Number of homes sold in January was 73, in June it was 125. Those 73 homes sold in January for a median $143,000, whereas the 125 sold in June went for a median $151,250. (Note, this is the more accurate median price, not average.)

This does not necessarily imply housing prices climbed that high. We suspect it reflects that buyers (and lenders) loosened up from the high-pucker alert level of last winter.

But either way you cook it, this market is smokin'. Across the board. Aside from Manufactured Homes (where tighter lending policies showed up recently) we are selling more 4-levels, more 3-levels, more 2-stories, more split foyers, and 75% more of the most popular Ranch Style.

As even further evidence, in January the purchased homes had on average 3.01 Bedrooms, 1.79 Bathrooms, and 1.47-Car Garage, on .18 Acres. (Average is a superior measure of ‘central tendency’ in this case than median.) In contrast, the homes we bough tin June had, on average, 3.15 Bedrooms, 1.94 Bathrooms, and 1.52 Garage stalls on .23 Acres.

In addition to the conventional market statistics, we at Black Hills Market Watch have also developed a small number of market indicators based on local hard data. We developed these special statistical indicators to help drill down through the bedrock of the market database, to find practical, useable information. We hope this will help you find just the right direction and timing of your next real estate transaction.

Here are two of these special Black Hills Market Watch indicators:

According to our tracking data, Average “Days-on-Market (DOM) Per Thousand Dollars Sale Price” dropped from .64 Days/Thousand in January to .30 Days/Thousand in June. We have also defined a composite “Functional Capacity Index” that measures the overall “How much room is there, for how many people, to function comfortably”? It’s a complex mathematical function* that considers numbers of bedrooms, bathrooms, half-baths, and garage stalls. The BHMW Functional Capacity for homes sold in January was 7.0, but by June it had climbed to 7.4.

As a final nail in the coffin of this dead idea that Black Hills real estate is dead, consider this. January homes sold for 94.7% of final asking price in January and nearly identically 94.6% in June. But quite significantly, while January homes sold for 89.4% of Original Price, that number had improved to 95.5% in June. One might conclude from this that there is a lot less discounting (“Price Reductions”) in the market today.

That can reflect two things. First, that sellers are not having to give away so much now in order to sell. Second, that home sellers (and their agents) now seem to be more realistic in setting their original list price.

Got questions? Call Dr. Lee Alley, founder and leader of the Black Hills Market Watch Team. On cell at GooglePhone at 605.223.1010, Twitter at @leealley, Facebook at lee.alley, email Lee@BHhomes.INFO.