Frederick County, Maryland and adjacent counties to the north and west yield more residential home transactions, but lower prices.
A mixed bag of residential housing information is coming out of the Mid-Atlantic regional sales data for May 2011.
Sale volumes of resale homes nearly reached $3 billion, which was about 18% less than that of one year earlier; however, 11.54% greater than a month earlier.
The number of units closed for the month was just shy of 9,000, which is 18.29% less than May 2010, but nearly 8% greater than that of April 2011.
A medium sold price of $265,000 remained about even with a less than 1% difference from last year, but showed a promising 6% increase over 30 days prior.
These statistics were released by Real Estate Business Intelligence, LLC (RBI), a wholly owned subsidiary of Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, Inc. (MRIS).
The region encompasses all Maryland area west of the Chesapeake Bay, a few counties in south central Pennsylvania and most of the northern halves of Virginia and West Virginia.
The other promising statistic is that pending sales volume increased to 12,399 units, or about 48% over May 2010, which has continued a strong trend that began in January of this year.
Local stats follow the regional trends.
Frederick County, Maryland, displayed a 7.8% increase in pending sales transaction over one year earlier with 608 units over the previous May of 564 contracts. Of this figure 103 contracts have house sale contingencies than the figures of May 2010 – a 184% increase in that category.
Dollar volume of sold homes totaled over $58 million, which is 25.41% less than a year earlier. This comprised of 235 transactions compared to 293 one year earlier.
The medium sales price for Frederick area resale housing dropped to $218,000. This is down 7.6% from last year’s $235,000, but 3.8% greater than April 2011’s figure of $210,000.
For more detailed RBI housing statistics on the May 2011 Frederick County market click here: Frederick County MD May 2011 Detail Report and Frederick County MD May 2011 Summary Report.
…and what is this supposed to be telling us?
Is your mind fully garbled yet? Well, here’s a simple summary of what this all means to this writer:
It’s a supply and demand thing. The supply of homes on the market is still much greater than the demand to buy.
Put another way, the inventory of active listings is burning off at a reasonable pace, but at the expense of residential home values.
As the number of “actives” drop from what was nearly a 12 month supply of inventory to below the current 8 month figure, the market will begin to see more stabilized prices and continue modest gains over the previous period.
The hope is that the trend of a declining inventory against an increased buyer demand will continue over the remainder of the year.
Rocky Mackintosh, President, MacRo, Ltd., a Land and Commercial Real Estate firm based in Frederick, Maryland. He is an appointed member of the Frederick County Charter Board. He also writes for TheTentacle.com.