By Mark Pruner
Dashboard Editor
February’s generally warm weather led to a great month for sales in Greenwich. We had 43 sales of single family homes reported by the Greenwich MLS. Our 10-year average for February is 31 and our previous high was February 2015 with 41 sales and we haven’t even included the private sales in these numbers.
We still need more inventory, but that is coming on quickly as our warm El Nino winter continues. Listings under $1.5M are selling at a torrid pace with less than 5 months supply.
Sales over $4M have been slow to take off this year, but that is becoming the new normal. It used to be that high-end sales matched the award of bonuses in the first quarter, but now that bonuses are mostly paid in stock and deferred over multiple years sales of higher end houses tend to happen in the 3rd and 4th quarters.
The market from $5 – 6.5M has been our sweet spot for high end sales as buyers who are being frugal and might have bought higher priced properties before are finding that this price range has just what they need.
Of our 43 sales so far this month 4 of them went for list or over list. These four ranged from $1.02M to $1.85M which has been our hot market for over a year.
When we add say a half dozen private sales for the month of February, last month is only going to look even more record breaking.
We have a steady march up in months of supply from under $600K pure combat buying to $4M where we have about a year and a half of supply, but this figure which would indicate a strong buyers market at other times of the year is actually more indicative of lots of inventory coming on the market. We also are seeing houses that were taken off for the winter coming back on. The GMLS policy is that if a house has been off the market for more than 90 than the days on market are reset to zero. So we are seeing lots of “new” listings that were on the market last month.
We are getting lots of new inventory coming on the market as we do every spring, this year it seems to have come on earlier and buyers have been taking advantage of it. The real test of this market is March which has seen it’s ups and downs the last few year. If it is anything like February, then 2016 could turn out to be a very good year.
Mark Pruner is with Douglas Elliman in Greenwich, CT.
Mark Pruner, Realtor
203-969-7900
mark@greenwichstreets.com
