Nick Kawakami

You may have seen the recent article titled, “Prices Through the Roof,” in the July 7th issue of the Star-Advertiser. Besides the fact that they used the exact same title, almost to the day last year, it’s a headline that will catch some eyes and sell some papers. While I’ve been talking about this climb for a while now, let’s take a look at the June numbers to see just how “through the roof” we are.

The biggest number on the board is the median sales price of single-family homes at $795,000. That’s to say, if we were to take all of the closings last month, put them on a list in order of sales price, and looked at the one smack in the middle, it would have sold for $795,000. On its own, that’s a big number and eerily close to $800,000. But if we look at the entire year as a whole, the median price is only up 3.2% year to date. Versus June 2016, which was up 6.1% year to date, that median number may seem large, but the overall market is showing slower growth. Yes, we may see that median price jump over $800,000 in the near future, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves and start predicting a million dollar median price by 2022.

The most surprising number, in my opinion, is the number of closed sales in the single-family home market. In June, that number jumped 14.2% over last year, and continues up year-to-date. With all the industry talk about limited inventory, the number of closed sales continue to climb. This is especially surprising as the months of inventory (the number of months it would take to sell everything, if nothing else came on the market) dropped 10% to 2.7 months.

Condos saw their numbers dip a little, but continue to rise year to date. At $400,000 median price for the month of June, and $399,000 median price year-to-date, they are also on track to close the year as expected. I don’t see any real reason to believe that the growth should change, but will be interested to see as a lot of new listings came on the market last month (692, up 18.5% over June 2016, and up 9.8% year-to-date over 2016).

Looking forward, I don’t see any shortage of growth in prices but will be watching the inventory numbers closely. I’ll be looking to see if that ratio between new listings and closed sales still pushes the months of inventory down, or if the high prices start a shift.

Happy July everyone!
Nick