Home sales trends in your community
All right, it's probably not amazing, it's certainly not one-time-only, and there's no money back because it's free. But I stand by splendiferous.
By popular request, I've crunched the October home sales tracked by Metropolitan Regional Information Systems so you can look at ZIP codes throughout the Baltimore area and see how sales numbers and average prices changed vs. a year earlier. (See this post for the big picture.)
If you're interested in seeing the ZIP codes ordered by the change in price, click HERE. If you're interested in ZIP codes ordered by change in sales, click HERE.
Once you have the Excel file open, of course, you can order things around exactly the way you want -- makes for a nice change from regular life.
I've tried to keep the apples-to-kumquats comparisons to a minimum by including only those ZIP codes with at least five home sales in October 2007 and at least five in October 2006. Even so, there are bound to be statistical oddities in areas where the homes sold last month were very different than those sold a year earlier.
With those words of caution in mind, have fun wonking! And do let me know if you notice anything interesting.
Comments
Thanks Jamie,
This is so enlightening. Now I can direct young people into areas where they may be able to find a home they can afford.
Posted by: cdnford | December 1, 2007 9:19 AM
HI Jamie - - - I looked at the numbers for my neighborhood (21231) & saw the appreciation to be +86% which quite surprised me ... so I researched via the Oct 2007 sales on baltimoresun.com ... while the spreadsheet states that the avg. price for Oct '07 is $445,248 I could not find anything above $351,000 on the baltimoresun.com info ... I thought that perhaps the MRIS info was different than that of what is listed in the paper, but found that the volume of sales were the same ... so I am confused ... can you tell me if/why there is discrepancy between the two sets of numbers?
Posted by: swrbi | December 1, 2007 8:24 PM
swrbi and I think we've discovered the reason there's a discrepancy: The MRIS data include two $1.6 million sales that weren't listed on the baltimoresun.com site. (I don't know why, since I'm not involved with The Sun's real estate search page.)
Nothing like a few million-plus sales to wrench the average upward.
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | December 3, 2007 8:37 AM