Prodigy Real Estate - SI NY Real Estate Blog

The most recent real estate market statistics for the month of September showed some changes in home sales for Staten Island.

The monthly sales had already started to decrease—and that was before the government had shut down.

The mortgage rates had jumped up at the beginning of September, but started to decrease throughout the month.  You would think that people would take advantage of the low rates, but we actually saw a ten percent decrease in home sales, with only 291 homes being sold for the month.  While this is still a good number—and almost twenty-seven percent higher than what we saw last year—it doesn’t look like we will be seeing numbers even remotely close to this in the coming months.

The average cumulative number of days that homes spent on the market in September was 140, which is about nine percent higher than what we saw last month.

With the number of homes on the market being 2,232 for September, the estimated amount of time it would take to sell all of those homes was 7.67 months.  With the drop in home sales, the amount of time it would take to sell all of the homes increased almost seven percent, even though the number of homes on the market decreased roughly four percent from the prior month.

The ever-decreasing amount of homes on the market is really the only trend we can see here, as it has been decreasing since June, when 2,471 homes were on the market.  It doesn’t look like many people want to sell at the moment, as we haven’t seen more than 2,500 homes on the market since the end of last year.

The past few months have shown increasing numbers for the average list price, average sale price, and median sale price.  The average list price increased about five percent from August, to $466,024.  The average sale price was at $440,131, which is an increase of almost four percent from the prior month.  These averages show that homebuyers were receiving more of a discount for their new homes, by paying an estimated 94.44% of the new home’s listing price.  In August, homebuyers were receiving 1.10% less of a discount on their new homes.

The median sale price, however, left off at $415,000, which is almost three percent higher than what we saw last month.  So it looks as though homebuyers were purchasing homes at higher prices, even though they were getting more of a discount.

With the sixteen-day government shutdown in October, we may be seeing a drastic decrease in home sales in the next report.  The fact that the Internal Revenue Service was shut down could have prevented many people from closing on houses.