Flagstaff home sales for May equaled May 2013 in volume. The median price for single-family homes sold was 11% higher than one-year ago.
Flagstaff home sales volume in May was lower than my expectation reported last month, which was based on the relatively large number of homes under contract for sale at the beginning of May. As I said in last month’s blog post, there were 146 Flagstaff homes in one of the “under contract” categories when I ran statistics at the beginning of May. Usually, such homes close within 40-45 days of the contract date. One common exception creating longer closing dates is new construction, and we have a lot of that going on in Flagstaff right now. Instead of over a hundred homes closed in May, as I thought we might have, we had 78. That number is identical to the number of sales in May 2013. This makes May the first month of 2014 when sales were not higher than in 2013. That now seems likely to be the pattern for the rest of the year – a good year coming up, but not much better than 2013, which, after all, was the best year since 2007. So, don’t complain too much.
The median price of homes sold in May was $325,000. That’s 11% higher than in May 2013 and one of the three highest monthly median prices in the last 17 months. This year, March was higher and April was lower. Don’t take the higher price year-to-year to mean we’ve got a home price increase trend going. Remember that inventory is increasing, so expect homes to sell for what they would have in 2013, perhaps slightly higher, but there isn’t a big price surge coming this summer.
The average size of the Flagstaff homes sold in May was 2131 square feet, with an average price per square foot of $172.
Inventory – homes actively for sale – increased substantially (by 95 homes) from the beginning of May to the beginning of June. Some of that is typical seasonal variation, some are folks who have wanted to sell and have been waiting for prices to rise slightly. We still have a shortage of homes for sale in the lower price ranges, as you can see in the chart. (Anything number in the “supply” column below 6 months is considered a sellers’ market.)
Note: The data reported here are based on home sales in the Flagstaff metro area (the City of Flagstaff and immediately surrounding county areas that have Flagstaff mailing addresses) as reported in the multiple-listing-service maintained by the Northern Arizona Association of Realtors.® The data may not reflect all sales (but it surely reflects most of them).
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