Last week we published some charts showing the direction of the overall single-family market in Hartford County for 2013. The quick summary was that sales activity has been increasing nicely for two years, but median prices have been stuck in a protracted valley.
The data tells a variety of different stories when we zoom in to the individual towns. Before we get there though, a quick disclaimer. It’s difficult to take too strong a position about any single data point without looking more deeply into what is happening in the town. We’re going from 7,000+ data points on the year at the County level down to a small percentage of that number for most towns. With that, here is the table showing each town.
The results are incredibly varied:
- East Granby saw the deal count increase 44% and the median sales price rise by 9%.
- The towns with the 2nd through 8th largest increases in deal count had median prices either remain virtually unchanged or decrease.
- Avon and Granby both exactly matched 2012 in terms of deal count, and both saw the median price rises.
- Simsbury remained basically unchanged in each metric.
- Only five towns had their number of successful closings decrease in 2013.
- Hartland, Marlborough and Farmington were the only three towns with negative deal count growth and negative median price change.
The markets in each town have their own story to tell. In order to understand what’s happening, the mix of homes that sold, and the level of distress in the market, must both be considered. One could imagine that the multiple towns with large increases in deal count but falling median prices were highly impacted by distressed sales.
We have a model that lets us more easily visualize the numbers for each town, organizing the raw sales data into various charts and tables. I doubt we’ll post the charts, there are far too many, so please feel free to reach out to us if you have specific questions about what is going on in a particular town. We are happy to share.