National home sales surge 10.1% What does this mean for Charlottesville area real estate?
November 23rd, 2009 categories: Albemarle County, Charlottesville, Communities, First Time Buyers, Fluvanna County, For Buyers, For Sellers, Lake Monticello, Market Statistics and Information, News, STR Market Info Blitz
This post is part of the Strong Team REALTORS Market Info Blitz. We’re heating up the Winter market by giving you three-months worth of the information you need, November through January. Check out the latest posts in the blitz, here.
What do all these stats really mean?
The National Association of REALTORS announced the national October sales numbers today. According to their statistics, existing-home sales surged 10.1% in October. Lawrence Yun, NAR Chief Economist, attributed the gain to the first-time homebuyer tax credit that was due to expire at the end of November. As we told you a few weeks ago, the tax credit program was eventually extended and expanded.
We encourage you to read the entire press release, because it contains good information that will give you a large overview of market conditions around the country, and some of the factors influencing those conditions.
Some of those factors include the tax credit, falling median prices, and interest rates that have remained historically low. All of these are factors that we have seen influence the Charlottesville area real estate market to varying degrees throughout the year.
From the NAR press release today, here are the major stats for October existing-home sales:
including single-family, townhomes, condominiums and co-ops – surged 10.1 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.10 million units in October from a downwardly revised pace of 5.54 million in September, and are 23.5 percent above the 4.94 million-unit level in October 2008. Sales activity is at the highest pace since February 2007 when it hit 6.55 million.
Obviously, this is good news for the national real estate market. It will be interesting to see how the numbers trend going into the winter, and whether or not the tax credit extension and expansion continues to buoy the market.
What does this mean for Charlottesville area real estate?
It is important to note that these numbers look at the United States as a whole. While the numbers might be indicative of what to expect in any given locality, it is always important to know what is going on in your local area.
Put very simply– national numbers are fine to look at, but you don’t buy or sell based on national numbers, you buy and sell real estate right here in the Charlottesville area.
A few weeks ago, we posted the October sales stats for Albemarle & Charlottesville, and Lake Monticello & Fluvanna, respectively. While those numbers weren’t bad, they certainly don’t reflect the same large surge that was seen in the national numbers.
The difference between national sales statistics and Charlottesville area sales statistics isn’t unexpected. One reason for the difference is that the Charlottesville area didn’t see the enormous drop in sales that was experienced in some areas of the country.
Very simply– the Charlottesville area didn’t fall as much as the national average, so it has less room to rebound.
What this all means is that you shouldn’t look at the Charlottesville area’s real estate market performance, as compared to the national market, and make too many assumptions. It is far more important to measure the Charlottesville area’s market performance against itself, as opposed to trying to measure it against the entire country.
Knowing how to properly measure market performance is one of the things that we learned early on. Sharing those proper measurements is something that we do with you and our clients and customers all the time through our quarterly market reports, and all of our more frequent market statistics.
While we’ll always share with you the national statistics that you’ll hear from the news, but you can also count on us to give you the Charlottesville area real estate market stats that you need to make informed decisions that will help you succeed.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lumaxart/ / CC BY-SA 2.0
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