Prodigy Real Estate - SI NY Real Estate Blog

We thought it couldn’t get any better, but it did. The latest market statistics for the month of July really blew away those from June.

First, let’s take a look at the monthly real estate sales on Staten Island. We saw an increase of more than eight percent from June to July, with 321 homes recorded as being sold in the latter month. The great part about this is that home sales have been rising steadily since March—that’s four months of increasing home sales! If you compare this past month’s sales to those of last year’s sales in July, we see an increase of over forty-five percent.

But hang on—let’s backtrack and compare it to when the sales started rising in March of this year. If you put March and July side-by-side, you’ll see an increase of almost seventy-five percent. This percentage rise would exceed typical seasonal shifts alone in home sales. That’s because in March, the sales were below average, with only 184 homes being sold. Currently, they’re about sixty percent above average.

We also saw an increase in the annual home sales. With 2,906 homes sold from August of 2012 up until July of 2013, we saw an increase of about eighteen percent, when compared to the prior twelve months. That number hasn’t even reached 2,500 since the span from August of 2009 to July of 2010, when 3,010 homes were sold in those twelve months.

Now, let’s take a look at home prices.

Due to the high number of sales made in July of 2013, the monthly volume reached $134,929,059. To clarify what monthly volume is, that is the total actual total dollar amount of all the homes that sold on Staten Island for the month. Last month hit a record high since the tax credit of June 2010, but this month outpaced June’s monthly volume by almost seven percent. Now if you compare it to July of 2012, we see an increase of over forty-four percent.

With these two numbers (the monthly sales and monthly volume) the average selling price is created. The average selling price for July was $420,339. This is a little more than one percent lower than we saw last month, but less than one percent lower than we saw in July of last year.

The average listing price moved much the same as the average selling price, having decreased from both the prior month and the prior year. From this past June, we saw an increase of almost two percent. From July of last year, the price had deceased almost three percent.

With these two numbers, we can determine the estimated discount given to homebuyers in the month of July. It looks as though homebuyers were paying 95.33% of the home’s listing price. This number has been increasing since April, when it was at 93.53%. However, we haven’t hit this high since August of 2007, when the number was 95.44%.

The median sale price is a different story altogether. We were shocked in May, when the median residential home sale price had exceeded $400,000, but the number has been decreasing since then and sadly, it reached $389,000 this past July. This was a decrease of over four percent from the prior month.

The good news is that the median sale price has been increasing each July. This past July, we saw an increase of over two percent from July of 2012. Likewise, the annual median sale price for the past twelve months was just $1,000 lower than our median for July, at $388,000. This is over two percent higher than we have been seeing over the years, with the annual medians for the last three spans of twelve months all being $380,000.

Overall real estate statistics continue to show strength on Staten Island... 

There were 2,390 homes on the market in the month of July. This may be lower than the jump we saw last month, when 2,434 homes were on the market, but the number has been staying between 2,300 and 2,400 since the beginning of the year. When compared to July of 2012, we see a decrease of over twenty percent. This is a pretty big gap, but ever since Hurricane Sandy hit, the housing inventory has been pretty low.

On the plus side, homes have been selling pretty quickly. The average cumulative number of days homes spent on the market in July was 147, a decrease of almost six percent from June and almost five percent from July of last year. The number of days homes are spending on the market has been decreasing since March of this year, which is great news.

On average, the number of months it would take to sell all 2,390 homes on the market is 7.44. This is almost ten percent less than we saw last month, and over forty-five percent less than we saw last July. This also brought the average down for the past twelve months, which left off at 10.57. This may be much higher than July’s average, but it is twenty-nine percent lower than the average for the span between August of 2011 and July of 2012.

So we’ve seen some pretty big changes this month. The monthly sales are the highest they have been since 2010, the estimated number of months it would take to sell the homes on the market is the lowest since 2010, and the average home listing and selling prices have gone down. The high mortgage rates may have had an impact on the housing market in July, but it still seemed to do pretty well. We haven’t seen much change in the beginning of August, so let’s hope that the rates don’t rain on the housing market’s parade by next month’s report.