March Market Report 2020

Will prices go up, or will they go down through COVID-19? Not only am I gonna answer that, but I'm gonna go over March's market report. We're comparing March of this year to March of last year.

Let's get into the numbers, the average list price right now in Whatcom County is $655,000 which is up 7% from last year. The average sold price in Whatcom County last month was $459,000 which is up 12% from last year. Now, we're going through COVID-19 that started mid March and having a stay-at-home ordinance, and home prices are still not yet going down. We have seen an increase of 12% from last year, and that is pretty big knowing that we had a big boom early February, March, and April last year.

This is where the data gets interesting because we saw this almost the same amount of homes for sale, in the month of March compared to last year. This year was 473, last year was 479, but, we saw a decrease of 17% of homes going under contract or pending in Whatcom County. We saw almost the same amount of homes for sale or the available inventory, but a lot less homes that went under contract.

Now, for the amount of homes sold, days on market, and months of inventory, we pretty much saw that pretty similar throughout, so I'm not gonna go into that too much. But I want to answer the question: are homes going to decrease in price or are they going to increase in price? Right now because the shortage of inventory that we still have, we haven't seen home prices fall consistently. There are still buyers out there that have jobs, maybe they're working from home, and they're taking advantage of these low interest rates and they're able to find a home. Right now there is less competition, unfortunately. There aren't as many people going out and looking at homes, so, right now some people are taking advantage of that, and we haven't seen home prices drop. So because we have low inventory home prices as we're seeing right now, are not going to decrease in value. Homes are still selling. In the market right now we are starting to see a little bit of struggle in the 600, 650 plus real estate market, where homes are still sitting there. But if a house is priced under 500,000 right now, most likely it still will sell within a couple days or even within that week. Now, if we start seeing massive amount of inventory, and then we start seeing homes not selling, that's when we will see homes decrease in price. So remember, the more inventory we have, that's when you'll start seeing a lot less or a lot more homes selling for less. But we have such high demand and lot less inventory, so right now we aren't seeing home prices decrease a lot like maybe people think they would.

I'm gonna in more depth into what's happening into our market here in a different post, but this is March's market report, I hope you liked it. Reach out to us any way if you have any questions, and we'll see you next time.