February Sales update for McCormick Ranch

While it is hard to believe that we are more than a month into 2019, we can now get our first glimpse of what the year may bring. As a standalone month, January looked rough. Really rough. Like somehow we got 6 inches of snow and the entire city just shut down. But, this seems to be an enigma left over from Q4 2018 as February and March sales are already quickly improving.

Condo sales have been incredibly strong over the last few years. In January, only 4 sold. We saw just 4 townhomes change hands and 3 patio homes claim new owners. However, 17 single family homes sold. Together, these continue the trend from September of approximately 30 homes sold a month. These numbers are also very similar to those from Sept 2015 through January 2016 (other years sales have been substantially higher).

But, there has already been a huge shift just these couple weeks into February. On February 1st, 43 McCormick Ranch homes were under contract (this should give us around 40 sold homes in February). As of today, February 12, there are 58 homes under contract. This is a lot of activity in a short period of time!

So what happened?

Well, most importantly, the sky has NOT fallen. The stock market recovered from the lows giving buyers more confidence in the market. Also, interest rates have dropped once again. The government shut down ended (although we will see if this remains to stay in effect). And, the holidays are over (December contracts generally create January sales)! In short, a lot of the uncertainty putting buyers on the edge went away.

And, the seasonality seems to have hit our market a little harder this year that previous years.

All that being said, even with the low number of sales, prices have held steady over the past few months. Price per square foot is healthy and increasing all around. Single family and condo prices have gone up substantially while townhome and patio homes have remained flat (although these get hit hardest with the seasonality of our market).