Your monthly real estate market update for Anne Arundel County with my considerations for buyers and sellers as we enter the new year.
Hey everyone it’s James Bowerman with the Real Creative Group of Douglas Realty, and you’re watching Creative Considerations. This is your January, 2020 real estate market update for Anne Arundel County. Now let’s start running through the numbers and then I’ll get into some of the considerations of how I see the market moving as we enter into the new year. Let’s start off with coming soon listing, you can see the green arrow, which means there was an increase in the amount of homes coming soon from last month to this month. That’s a good thing because inventory is low and we want to see more homes coming on the market, and it’s not really typical for this time of year, so I’m really happy to see that. Next we’ll talk about active listings and you’ll see that red arrow, which is not a good sign, it means there’s even less homes on the market available to purchase than there were last month.
With less inventory we’re also seeing less homes going under contract, so that’s why there’s a direct correlation between those two numbers and the red arrow going down. Down here is where it starts to get interesting during the month of December, we don’t see that many homes sold, but we see the green arrow there, which means more homes sold in December. Then they did in November. Typically we don’t see an increase from November to December with the amount of homes sold, but that gives us an interesting insight into how the market’s moving forward, and I’m going to touch on that in a minute. Next, let’s talk about sold to list price ratio. Right now we’re at an average of 98.8%. With less inventory there is higher demand, which is pushing those prices up. And finally we’ll look at days on market, which did increase slightly. I don’t think this is any kind of significant change. There are still homes that are coming on that are selling very quickly, and with the holiday season it’s kind of expected that you might see home sitting for just a little bit longer.
So what does this all mean if you’re looking to buy or sell a home? Well, let’s start with buyers. If you’re thinking about buying a home, you have got to be ready with little inventory out there homes are going to sell quick. They’re going to sell with multiple offers and they’re going to sell very close or if not above what the list price is. So what does this mean if you’re a seller? I wouldn’t recommend waiting until spring because in my opinion with these numbers, the spring market is already here. I recently enlisted two homes on January 2nd, the first one sold in three days with six offers above list price. The second one sold in four days above list price as well.
So if you’re thinking about selling, now is the time to start having that conversation and getting your home ready. A lot of similarities from last year to this year where there’s not a lot of inventory, we’re going to have a lot of competition getting into a lot of multiple offers situations, and keeping those sales prices high. So those are my considerations as we enter into 2020 if you’re looking to buy or sell and need some help, please feel free to reach out or leave me a comment below. Thank you so much for watching and we’ll see you again soon.