I am fairly certain that the spring real estate market turned on last week. Do you know how I know this? I started waking up at 4am without the assistance of my alarm clock, thinking about all of the work that I needed to do, and then getting up to do it. Activating new listings, preparing for more listing appointments for houses that will come on the market, and then the subsequent showings with buyer
July was an active month in the West Hartford single-family real estate market, but not quite as exciting as June. There were 86 closings in July, which was modestly above the 2012 count, and on a year-to-date basis we are about 12% ahead of 2012 in the total number of closed deals. The statistics can shift a lot over the summer months. Buyers that put properties under contract in the spring close on those deals
We had a sense that the real estate market was picking up, but numbers are even more impressive than we would have guessed. The number of single-family contracts written in Hartford County was up 50% over February of last year. The pace of deals this year is also ahead of 2010, when there was a first time home buyer tax credit. The strong January result is starting to look less like an abnormality. February continued
December single-family contracts came in at 357 for Hartford County, which was slightly higher that the number of deals that came together in November. December is traditionally the slowest month of the year, so having it outpace any other month is a bit of a surprise. We think that the usually large snow storm, which was felt through the beginning of November, worked to push some business into the year’s final month. This December also
Single-family contracts totaled 532 in August, a slight decline from July’s total, though an increase over August 2010’s tally – it was a summer month with sporadic activity. Hurricane Irene passed through the County during the final week of the month, putting most of the real estate market on hold for at least three days, with some areas affected through the end of the month. We don’t know for sure how much of an impact