All Blog Entries by Anthony Licciardello

At nearly 6%, the 30-year fixed mortgage rate hit a 13 year high this month. Have buyers pulled back in our seller’s market?

Average Home Sale Prices

For the second time in history, home sale prices broke $700,000 in Staten Island last month. The average home now sells for $706,557. In New Jersey we see the same thing happening. For Monmouth and Ocean counties, prices came back to record levels at $551,061. Only in September of 2021 did average home prices eclipse that, coming in at $554,307.

Available Inventory

Inventory is also still struggling to keep up with demand. Active listings are down from last year in both markets. In New Jersey, active listings fell 26% from last year to 2,553 from 2021’s 3,439. Staten Island…

Interest rates are now giving home buyers sticker shock. The market has dropped in Staten Island, as well as much of the United States. The Jersey Shore market continues to hold its own.

Mortgage rates around the country are now 5.37% according to CNBC Real Estate, the highest since 2009. Borrowing rates have risen faster than expected to, and are projected to rise further by year’s end.

Home prices fell in Staten Island by $26,775 to an average of $669,258. Active listings are also up by more than 100, from 1,279 in February to 1,381 in March. New listings came in at a healthy 654 new homes this month. This is on par with one year ago, when 659 new homes were listed in March. Sales are up from February’s 374 to 425 in March.…

All around the nation, mortgage rates have been rising for the first time since the start of the pandemic. Home prices have begun to stabilize after their breakneck climb.

Here in our local markets, Staten Island and The Jersey Shore, we do see some similarities between the two. But there are pronounced differences between buying and selling in these two areas.

Breakdown: Staten Island and New Jersey Real Estate, March 2022

Staten Island is the more stable market of these two. The Jersey Shore market is more volatile. Staten Island home prices remained about the same in February as they did in January. The average Staten Island home sold for $710,776 last month.

In Monmouth and Ocean Counties, prices came down quite a bit.…

There simply aren’t enough houses to go around! Inventory shortages have once again pushed home prices to a record high.

For the first time, the average home sale price in Staten Island cracked $700,000. The average property now sells for $707,376, an amazing $45,251 increase in just one month! In Monmouth and Ocean Counties, the average home fetched $540,740. Although this was up 14% from last year’s $474,411, prices in New Jersey appear to have stabilized over the past few months.

The inventory squeeze has created high buyer competition in both markets. In Staten Island, just 1,228 listings are available for the entire county. By contrast, 1,763 homes were listed at the same time last year. This hot seller’s market offers 30% less inventory…

2021 was a historic year for real estate. Pandemic boom towns brought remote workers out to the suburbs, starting bidding wars that brought home prices to record highs.

Our two main markets, Staten Island and The Jersey Shore, are attractive for buyers leaving New York City. Combine this trend with the lowest borrowing rates in a lifetime, add in constrained new construction inventory, and this past year was a roller coaster to say the least!

Across the US, new construction has not kept up with shrinking inventory. Supply constraints pushed up home prices nationwide. But each market is different, as we found when serving clients in the New York Metro area and the Jersey Shore area.

Year Over Year Comparison:

Home Sale Price

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Prices came back up again this past month in Staten Island. Despite a small slip in early fall, the average home in Richmond County now sells for $666,041. For the past six months now, home prices have stabilized around the $660,000 mark.

On the other hand, our new ventures into New Jersey have opened up an entirely different market. By contrast, the New York City market has been on a steady climb in recent years. Home prices on the Jersey Shore have been more volatile. Here, buyer activity is off the charts (literally).

In Monmouth and Ocean Counties, real estate now sells for above 100% of its asking price. Even in the hottest months, Staten Island homes have always sold at a slight discount from list price for as long as we have been…

For the past year or so low interest rates whipped buyers into a frenzy. Although most stats are still strong in the seller’s favor, July saw a pullback in home prices nearly $30k less than the prior month.

Summer is normally a busy listing season. While listings were back up to a solid total of 593 for the month, July’s new listings still fell short of the last few summers. Both during the pandemic in 2020 and pre-Corona in 2019, new listings in July were still higher.

In addition, the amount of total listings is down significantly. Only 1,553 Staten Island properties were up for sale in July. And since this includes pending sales, the true number of available homes is even lower than that. In July of 2020, Staten Island sellers listed…

Inventory is down, prices are up, and sold listings are up too. The market is still clearly in favor of sellers. But for how long?

This past month, the average home sale price rang in at $653,519. Prices have been rising ever since the pandemic started last year, when home prices were $608,817. In a year, home prices have increased 7.5%.

Active listings fell 19% since last year too. There are currently only 1,517 homes for sale in Staten Island; last year 1,874 properties were available. Housing supply has now dwindled every month for an entire year since lockdown ended last June 2020. A tighter supply will of course increase demand, and the amount of new listings has not been keeping pace with the rise in sales.

In the month of May…

By every single measure we have, home sales came in swinging this month, crushing previous record highs.

The average home sold for $628,449 in April, up 5% over last year and $15k above the prior month of March. $628,449 is a record-breaking sale price, outpacing January’s previous record of $626,468.

Home sale prices have the most fanfare, but we really need to look at inventory to tell the whole story. Both sold listings and new listings were up astronomically, though I’m sure you can probably guess why. 406 homes sold in the month of April compared to just 153 in April of 2020. The pandemic hit in March full force and the whole world stopped. This explains the outlier in home sales and also new listings, which jumped more than sixfold…

For the second month in a row now, home prices remained pretty much exactly the same. March’s average sale price came in at $614,312. This is less than $100 more than the prior month’s average of $614,253, and down from January’s record-breaking high of $628,652.

Housing Inventory Tightens

Yet, this comes along with reduced inventory, which normally pushes prices up. Active listings are down to a stunning 1,499. One year ago, 2,189 homes were up for sale here in Richmond County. This means available homes have dropped 32% in one year. But prices increased only 6% since 2020, when the average home sold in March for $578,773.

Home sales have surged nearly 70% year over year as well. In March 2021, 452 home sales closed, compared to…