In last week’s column (which you can read below), I showed how the market continued to be active from March 22nd to 28nd, despite the growing impact of Covid-19 and imposition of a stay-at-home order.
It seems appropriate for me to do a similar analysis of the following week which ended last Saturday, April 4th.
This time I limited the stats to listings on REcolorado that were within a 20-mile radius of the state capitol, since our MLS includes many far-flung listings.
What I found is that between March 29th and April 4th, there were 1,136 new listings, 884 of which were still active on Monday, April 6th. 207 of them went under contract by week’s end, and 19 were withdrawn or expired.
This compares to 1,651 new listings during the same 7 days in 2019, of which 329 were under contract by April 6th of that year. Only 4 listings were expired or withdrawn immediately.
Since those numbers were about 50% higher than this year, I analyzed the same 7-day periods in 2016, 2017 and 2018, and was surprised to see that last year was an anomaly. During the same 7 days of all three prior years, the number of new listings was roughly the same as this year, although the number of quick contracts was much higher, as you’d expect from the stronger seller’s market that we were experiencing during those years.
In 2018, there were 1,192 new listings during the same 7-day period, 51 of which were entered as already sold. Of the “active” listings, 290 were under contract within that 7-day period and 4 were expired.
In 2017, there were 1,161 new listings during the same 7-day period, 58 of which were entered as sold. Of the “active” listings, 413 were under contract within the same 7 days, and 3 were expired immediately.
In 2016, 1,285 new listings were entered during the same 7-day period, 50 of which were entered as sold. Of the “active” listings, 392 were under contract during that 7-day period, and 7 were expired immediately.
Undoubtedly some sellers kept their homes off the MLS this year because of Covid-19, but still a lot of homes were made active this year, comparable to 3 of the past 4 years for that period. Listings are not going under contract nearly as fast, but it’s still impressive how many of them are selling quickly. Sellers should not shy away from listing their homes for sale at this time.
