Hey Aptos – we’re officially – finally! – in summer, so it’s time for the Aptos Real Estate Update June 2016! And this time – for the first time in ages – there is actually some NEWS in the Aptos Real Estate market! And the news could be good, or bad, depending on your perspective…so check this out:
Aptos Real Estate Market Showing Weakness
You’ll probably want to know that the median home price for single family homes in Aptos in May 2016 was $855,000. This is 1.8% higher than the year-ago median of $840K – but after accounting for inflation, the “real” median price is virtually unchanged from a year ago.
But a lot of other numbers did change, like sales volume. We sold 22 homes in Aptos in May 2016, a decrease of 24% from a year ago when 29 homes sold in May 2015.
What’s YOUR Aptos House Value?
Homes also took longer to sell than a year ago – the homes which sold did so in an average of 43 days, nearly 23% slower than this time last year, when homes sold in an average of 35 days.
Sellers also received less compared to their asking price this year, receiving just 99.6% of asking price. That sounds great, but last year, sellers received 101.9% of asking price in May 2015.
Aptos Seller’s Market May be at its End
The big news in this month’s Aptos real estate news is that we may be reaching the end of this amazing seller’s market we’ve had for the past several years. There are presently a total of 104 single family homes listed for sale on the Aptos MLS, with 21 of them under contract. The way I figure it, that means there is now a 5.9 month supply of homes.
What happened? How did we go from less than 3 months’ supply of homes to nearly six? Check out this chart below:
This chart shows listing and sales activity in the “Spring” period in Aptos (March 20th through June 20th) from 2003 through 2016. As you can see, there were relatively few houses listed in Aptos this spring – 22% fewer than average, with just 116 homes having been listed this spring versus an average of 149 homes in the other years.
While new listings are down – sales volume is way, way down. Between 2003-215 we averaged 87.8 homes sold in the spring period; this year, we had 64 go ‘pending’ – many of which are under contract still as of this writing and may fall out. But assuming that all of those ‘pending’ homes close, we’re still have 27% fewer sales this spring than average – and 33% fewer closings than last spring.
[Home-Search-Callout]
When you add it all up, it’s clear that May 2016 was a poor month for home sales in Aptos, and that the whole spring selling season was remarkably soft.
It’s too soon to call this a trend, but the fact is we are now poised on the precipice of leaving a seller’s market (defined as a market with less than 6 months’ supply of homes). There is more inventory available today than we’ve seen in a long, long time – and if buyers don’t step up to buy these homes chop-chop, we can expect to see this translate into lower home prices.
What about the rest of our area?
Want to know what’s going on with home prices in the Bay Area? For a complete report on our regional market as a whole, check out my recent article about making sense of Bay Area Home Prices
Low, Median, and Highest Sales – Single-Family Homes
Low, Median, and Highest Sales – Condos/Townhomes
There were 10 sales of condos and townhomes in May 2016, a drop of 8.3% compared to a year ago. The median sales price was $626,000 – a gain of 9.8% compared to the prior year’s median of $570,000. These 10 homes sold in an average of 39 days on market, and sellers received 99% of asking price for their homes, similar to last year when they received 99.6%.
