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March 11, 2010

Baltimore home sales in February

Home sales up. Prices down. Newly signed contracts up, but not as big a year-over-year jump as we've been seeing -- thanks, blizzards.

Those are the housing-market basics for the Baltimore metro area last month. If you want more details along those lines, check out today's home sales story. Rather than retreading the same ground here, I thought I'd share a few other interesting stats:

25: Percentage of metro area homes that sold in 30 days or less.

33: Percentage that sold in 121 days or more.

38: Percentage of homes financed with loans insured by the Federal Housing Administration. (Long gone are the days when no one went FHA.)

20: Percentage of homes paid for entirely with cash. (Investors, usually.)

1,177: Homes that sold in the metro area last month, up nearly 10 percent from a year earlier.

1,757: Homes that sold in the metro area in February 2000, just to put things in perspective.

207: Homes that sold for $200,000 to $249,999 last month, the most popular price range.

114: Homes that sold for $500,000 or more. (Yes -- not that much more than half what sold in the low to mid $200s.)

10: Months it would take to find buyers for all the homes listed for $200,000 to $249,999 at February's pace of sales.

23: Months it would take for all the homes listed for $500,000-plus.

And finally, 56: Homes that sold for less than $30,000. Many, presumably, to those investors paying cash.

As always, the numbers come from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. If you see other numbers there that fascinate you, do share.

Posted by Jamie Smith Hopkins at 7:00 AM | | Comments (5)
Categories: Housing stats
        

Comments

Jamie:

I think it's easy to misinterpret your statistic that 25% of metro area homes sold in 30 days or less.

Given that--according the the MRIS website-- there were 294 (25% of 1177) homes that sold in 30 days or less in February, and also given that there were 16,271 homes for sale, one could also say that 1.8% of the available inventory sold in 30 days or less.

Good point, John -- 25 percent refers to what share of SOLD homes sold in 30 days or less. (Of course, some number of the 16,271 homes on the market are newly listed, so they could still end up selling before they cross the 30-day mark.)

I wonder what the percentage of the homes sold in 30 days or less were cash offers? Any way to find out?

Frank, it's possible that someone with access to the MLS could tell you. But there's no way to answer that from the publicly available stats on MRIS's site. (Good question, though.)

I always appreciate home sale stats. I am an Owner/Broker of Az Realty Results L.L.C. in Scottsdale Arizona.
The home prices here are up from last year, and there is on average a million dollar plus home sold everyday here in the city of Scottsdale alone.

Scottsdale AZ is the land of the Luxury homes, and they do sell. There were 303 homes sold this year so far in Scottsdale that were one million or more, and the top sale thus far this year was 7.5 million and was a cash sale.

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About Jamie Smith Hopkins
Jamie Smith Hopkins, a Baltimore Sun reporter since 1999, writes about the regional economy. Her reporting on the housing market has won national and local awards. Hopkins is a Columbia native and has lived in Maryland all her life, save for 10 months spent covering schools in Ames, Iowa.
She trained to become a wonk by spending large chunks of time as a geek and an insufferable know-it-all.
Baltimore Sun articles by Jamie
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