The price ranges with rising home sales (surprise!)
Q: Did any price ranges see home-sale gains in September, despite the overall drop?
A: Why, yes. So glad you asked.
You probably won't be shocked to hear that sales in the under-$100,000 category increased, compared with a year ago, since that's the most affordable to buyers and is also the niche most attractive to investors. But guess what also rose? Sales of $1-million-plus homes.
I analyzed sales data from Metropolitan Regional Information Systems for Baltimore and the surrounding suburbs, and here's what the stats showed:
Sales of homes priced under $100,000 rose 30 percent, from 208 a year ago to 270 in September.
Also up: homes priced in the $500,000s. Sales in that price range rose 31 percent, to 101 homes.
Sales of homes in the $800,000s remained steady at a grand total of 11. Every other category dropped. (This is according to MRIS's dataset of all sales, which varies a bit from its online report because it's culled at a different time.)
The $200,000s was the most popular price range in September, same as a year earlier. But the buying pool there really shrunk. People picked up 475 homes in that category, compared with 700 a year ago -- a 32 percent drop.
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Comments
Jamie, just because I'm curious... what were monthly sales figures for these house ranges in 2006/2007/2008? I'm curious about how much different those numbers are from today's numbers.
For example, about 100 homes in the $500k's sold last month, which is up from last yr, but what about compared to 2006/07/08? I'm really curious.
Posted by: Chappy10 | November 3, 2010 6:25 PM
Chappy10, I'm sure the various price ranges are way down from 2006, and probably compared with 2007, too. I don't have the numbers here at home, but I'll try to do an analysis when I get some time at work.
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | November 3, 2010 8:30 PM
is there any way we could look this up ourselves? or is all this data private? (seems like it should be publicly available info)
Posted by: Chappy10 | November 4, 2010 11:22 PM
You can, but it's not quick and easy. Here's where you can find Baltimore-area stats: http://www.rbintel.com/statistics/baltimore-metro
If you click on the historical reports, you'll see that the sales are broken down by price range AND number of bedrooms. So you have to tally up the sales by bedroom in order to get a grand total for various price ranges.
Posted by: Jamie Smith Hopkins | November 5, 2010 7:10 AM