Hi all – here are some year-over-year stats showing how what
the market did for the year 2013…
- Single family median price/square foot: +19%
- Condo median price/square foot: +24%
- Aggregate median price/square foot: +21%
- Aggregate median price: +16%
- Sales: -16%
- Active inventory: +39%
- Contingent inventory: -61% (contingent went from being 44% of
inventory in Dec 2012 to just 18% in Dec 2013) - Total inventory: -6%
- Months of inventory: +10%
Graphs of various data through December can be found below. I am
almost done updating the valuation charts so I should have those up
soon.
Rich,
The correlation
Rich,
The correlation between inverse months of inventory and price changes has been pretty correlated over the past few years (it seems), but since Jan of 2013, the correlation seems to have more variance ( visually the gap between the lines seems wider). Do you have any theories on what is happening there?
Yes, interesting
Yes, interesting observation/question. Another way to look at it, I think, is that monthly price changes have become more volatile lately. Why might that be happening?
Probably rates are the biggest culprit… on the upside, we had the feeding frenzy which was certainly encouraged by super low rates, and that pushed up prices fast. Then rates jumped significantly, and that pushed demand and eventually prices down. Not a super satisfying answer but I guess I’d say the situation with rates (unusually low levels, followed by a lot of volatility) has caused price changes to become more volatile.
Looks to me like it’s not
Looks to me like it’s not that the correlation has decreased between the two, but that it has changed somewhat in nature. It looks like the two axes are mis-aligned for recent data: If 0 on the price change axis was aligned to 5 or even 4 months on the inverse months of inventory axis, and the latter was also expanded (zoomed in) a bit, such that a smaller change in inverse months of inventory corresponded to the same change in the price change, then the correlation would visually look a lot better.
For whatever reasons, maybe the new critical inventory size is now 4-5 months instead of 6?