How’s Your Neighborhood’s Real Estate Market Doing?

When you compare neighborhoods the toughest place for a buyer to find a home is the Byram, Pemberwick and Glenville area of town. We only have 33 houses inventory, while 8 houses are under contract and 31 houses have sold in this area so far this year. If you are looking for a house under $1M this neighborhood is a good place to start, but to get the best house you need to be able to move quickly.

Greenwich Neighborhoods Houses Months of Supply

Our next toughest neighborhood for buyers is Riverside. There we only have 57 listings with an amazing 24 houses under contract which is a sign of just how fast houses move on and off this market. With 72 houses sold this year Riverside is the neighborhood that is hitting the buyers various demand most closely. Now when some people think Riverside they think the multi-million dollars houses along Long Island Sound, but the area of Riverside just north of the Post Road is an R-7 zone with many affordable houses like Glenville.

I grew up in Old Greenwich and Old Greenwich and Riverside never seemed that different, we played in the Old Greenwich Riverside Community Center baseball leagues and went to Eastern Junior High in Riverside, but this year the OG market has seen a little less demand than Riverside with more inventory 62 versus 57, less sales 64 versus 72, and fewer houses under contract 13 versus 24. This is not a huge difference, just the difference between hot and red hot so when something comes on that you like at a good price you still need to be ready to move quickly.

At the other end of the market is backcountry where we have 128 listings and only 34 sales so far this year. This gives us 32 months of supply or over 2-1/2 years of supply. The numbers you want to look at, if you are looking in the back country, is the number of contracts where we have 14 contracts and the number of sales in the last 30 days where we have 7 sales. Annualize those sales and you have a huge drop to only 18 months of supply. Now a year and half of supply is still a fair amount, but it shows that the market is improving in backcountry and illustrates a trend we have seen the last couple of years.

We used to get a lot of our high-end sales earlier in the year as Wall Streeters spent their cash bonuses, now that the bonus structures have changed, sales over $3M dollars are peaking later in the year. With much of mid-country and backcountry over that price we are only now seeing our months of supply dropping significantly in those areas.

When you look at the months of supply bars you can see which neighborhoods are heating up by comparing the sales months of supplies with sales and contracts and the last 30 days annualized. When you see a steady downward trend in each of these categories like in Riverside, South of the Post Road, South of the Merritt and in Backcountry the market is getting better and more of a seller’s market.

Overall our market is doing fine. We have 552 single family home listings and 381 sales year-to-date. July sales were a disappointment, but only in comparison to the stellar sales of June 2015. We have 103 houses under contracts a good number for this time of the year.  Our condo sales are up and the apartment market is busy. If you are selling in Riverside and priced right you should be thinking about which moving company you are going to use. If you are buying and looking in backcountry and mid-country over $4 million you have some good choices. Even in these areas houses from $1 – 2.5M are a competitive market.

Mark Pruner – mark.pruner@elliman.com