By Mark Pruner
Lowest inventory ever, but average sales
We had 30 single family home sales in January 2025, which is actually up from last year’s 28 sales and the same as we had in January 2023. We did this with 25% less inventory. In January 2024, we opened the year with 86 listings, but by the end of the month, we had grown to 114 listings. This year we opened with 85 listings, but by the end of the month we were right back to 85 homes on the market. That is a record low for any week going all the way back to 1986, where my brother, Russ’ numbers start. (It helps to have a brother and a Greenwich Streets teammate who has been doing this for 39 years. 🙂
What we did see was that while contracts dropped for the first three weeks of the year, they came back in the last two weeks of January to 41 contracts, compared to 35 contracts at the end of January 2023. Contracts are a differential number, derived from the number of new contracts minus the number of sales. Since sales were up slightly in January, this means that even with this very low inventory, more property were going to contract than last year.
Our inventory of single-family homes is at its lowest level ever. We had no listings under $1 million. We had a “blue moon” that came on in the second week of January and went to contract the following week. As a result, that house never appeared in the monthly inventory numbers. We do have two houses that were listed for under $1 million, that are under contract.
In a remarkable turnaround, 76.7% of the houses that were sold in January were sold for under list price. This compares to 41.2% in houses selling for under list price in all of 2024. You might think that this near doubling of sales under list price is indicative of a softening market.
Unfortunately, what it is indicative of is the cyclical nature of the Greenwich real estate market. We had 24 new listings in January 2025 come on the market, while we only had 15 new listings come on in the prior month in December 2024. As a result, what sold in this January were older homes that have been on the market for a while. Our median days on market for all of 2024 was 22 DOM, it was 70 days for our January 2025 sales.
This makes the market even tighter as even older listings are going to contract. Our contracts are up 17% from last year to 41 contracts, which still isn’t a lot. This can’t continue, as you can see when looking at months of supply including contracts. For most price ranges we are seeing months of supply going up when you include contracts and assume the sales will happen in an average of 45 days. This means that we will see fewer closings in February.
Two areas where sales are likely to improve are $3 – 4 million and over $10 million where we have 7 contracts and 4 contracts respectively. This compares to 2 sales so far this year for both price categories. Our days on market with contracts is only 7.1 months, which is the lowest DOM for our ultra-high-end, ever post-Great Recession. Part of that is sales, but much of it is having only 17 houses to sell over $10 million.
That part of our market is doing well, but it is also the part of the market that has the greatest cyclical nature, with few of our largest mansions on the market in the normally aptly named dead of winter. Having said that everything over $5 million has very low months of supply and much lower inventory. Our team, with Felipe Dutra as lead agent, listed a house in the top 10 of price and were amazed with how many showings we had and multiple offers.
Unless we get a lot more inventory in February and a lot of that quickly goes to contract, our February months of supply is likely to go up and our sales may be even lower in February. However, that is what normally happens in February. Our spring inventory finally arrives, buyers move in quickly to sign contracts and the shortest month of the year is also usually our month with the least sales.
Cross your fingers that February is a normal month at least for inventory….
Mark Pruner is a real estate agent with Compass Connecticut. He is a co-founder of the Greenwich Streets Team at Compass. He can be reached at 203-817-2871 or mark.pruner@compass.com.
