Expert Advice from Amy & Kyle Bergquist
The 2021 real estate market is ultra-competitive for buyers in basically all price points below $700,000. Houses are regularly selling above the asking price, and in some cases well above. Our analysis of first quarter closings found that 51.5% of the single-family sales closed over asking. April was even more dire for buyers as 65% of deals closed over asking. The table below also shows that the median winning bid in the deals that closed
Hartford County finished April with 1,035 single-family contract signed, which was a respectable number for the month. Comparing the total to April 2020 is pointless because the pandemic brought everything to a halt that month. This year’s total was in line with April results going back to 2016. There was a slight increase in new listings during April, with 1,144 single-family homes entered into the SmartMLS system compared to 1,011 in March. Despite the uptick,
The number of single-family homes that closed for more than the asking price remained quite high in the first quarter of the year. Looking at the quarterly trend since the beginning of 2019 clearly shows that the current market is behaving differently from the very active market that was observed in 2019. Over half of the Q1 deals closed for more than asking, even with sellers factoring the stronger market into the asking price. This
Hartford County finished March with 1,029 single-family home contracts signed. The total was a dramatic improvement over the February 2021 total, and a 10% increase over the pandemic-influenced March 2020 total. The first quarter of the year ended about 3.5% behind the record-setting pace of 2020. In positive news, more homes were listed for sale in March than were in the prior months. The seasonal trends in the real estate market seemed to play out
The Hartford County real estate market fell well off the 2020 pace in February. The month finished with 715 single-family contracts compared to 864 last February before the pandemic hit, a decline of over 17%. This February’s total was also only slightly higher than the January 2021 total, signaling something unusual in the market. We have seen flat month-over-month performance to begin the year in our dataset before, but the prior examples were in years