This is part three in the Mother of All Real Estate Reports series featuring charts, graphs and analysis of the Tallahassee real estate market for August of 2010. If you want to review the previous posts, the first blog of real estate graphs can be found here, while the second housing blog is here. Most readers with a strong interest in the real estate market should appreciate this series, as there are many pictures and very few words .
New Construction Sees Very Little Activity
When we look at the trend of single family building permits and new construction sales, it is very clear why it is so tough being a home builder these days. Currently, we are seeing about 1/4th as many new homes being built and sold as we did in 2005/2006.
Another way to view this information show the cycles of consumption and glut. Currently, we are selling more homes than we are building, which is a good thing for the Tallahassee real estate market.
New Construction For Condominiums & Townhouses
New construction for “attached” housing is an interesting picture. Condos and townhouses are near 2003 values (blue line below) and the current level of unit sales is way down from the boom (crimson bars below), but not altogether low when looking back over the past 20 years. But I think this is misleading.
The reason that current unit sales numbers does not look low compared to the not-so-recent past is because we just didn’t have much of a condo or townhome market back in the 1990s. As the cost of land has gone up, we saw more and more homes being built on smaller parcels of land, as well as those that are attached. Therefore, I do think this market very well mirrors the single family detached home market.
The existing condo and townhouse sales is also peculiar. The average price continues skyward even as new units are built and sold for amounts far lower. Could this be the downtown Tallahassee condo effect?
Residential Market Snapshot
This next real estate graph is very good at showing past results each year through July. Thanks (most likely) to the First Time Homebuyer program, this year has outperformed last year (the worst year in the 20 year report), but I think this same graph through December is a coin toss between 2009 and 2010, as we will have to finish the year without the stimulus that was in place the same time last year.
The graph below is much like that above, showing single family home sales through July in the Tallahassee real estate market.
And the graph below is much like the 2 above, showing condo and townhouse sales through July as slightly better, but note how the results are not really out of line with historical sales.
Check back here tomorrow where we will finish up our Mother Of All Real Estate Reports v. II series with more charts, graphs, and analysis of the Tallahassee real estate market.
Please feel free to check out the June 2010 edition of the Tallahassee Housing Report. This month, we are experimenting with video and will base future reports upon the feedback that we receive from this and other editions.
Just click the play arrow in the video below to get started. You can also make it full-screen size (recommended) by clicking the icon in the bottom right of the video display window.
The following real estate graphs are included in the Tallahassee Housing Report:
Success and Failure rates for home listings in Tallahassee
Overall market forecast for the Tallahassee housing market.
We hope you enjoy the first video edition of the Tallahassee Housing Report and again we request as much feedback as possible. You can leave comments and give “thumbs up (or down)” by clicking through the video to youtube and rating the June Housing Report. Please know that your feedback is very valuable to us and will help guide our future production of market reports.
If you wish to be provided with more information, just include your requests in the comments section of the video on the Youtube page, or you can do it below in the comments section of this blog post.
Great Real Estate Resource Sites
Do you want to know more about the Tallahassee real estate market? It is not as hard as you might think keeping up with the movements in the housing market, you just have to know where to look. The following realty resources are some of the best that you can find, and they are updated on a regular basis and are worth a book mark for people interested in the changing dynamics of the market.
Last week, we uncovered an interesting methodology that we can use to evaluate long term home sales trends in the Tallahassee real estate market (or any other market in which you might have an interest). It involved using 20 years worth of housing market data in order to show the 1 year, 5 year, and 10 year moving averages for different metrics that we wanted to measure in the real estate market.
No other measurement is more important than overall home sales activity, and we measure this by looking at monthly home sales each month. In the real estate graph below, we have recorded monthly activity along with all of the trends mentioned above.
In the real estate graph above, we have borrowed an analysis process from Wall Street (thanks to long-time reader Steve R.). It has been a common practice for system traders to use technical analysis when trying to determine the future movement of a stock price. Steve suggested we use the same basic principal on the housing market, and the graph above is the result.
In the graph, the yellow dots are each a representation of the number of home sales that occurred during that month, while the lines represent “moving averages” for all of this data. Thus, the one year moving average is the average number of homes sold over the past twelve months, the five year moving average is the average number of homes sold over the past 60 months, etc.
Using Moving Average Crossovers To Analyze Securities
Wall street traders use moving averages to develop simple trading systems based on moving average crossovers. A trading system using two moving averages would give a buy signal when the shorter (faster) moving average advances above the longer (slower) moving average. A sell signal would be given when the shorter moving average crosses below the longer moving average.
The number of crossovers generated will depend on the length of the moving averages. Shorter moving average systems will be faster and generate more crossovers, but they will also generate more false signals than the longer moving averages.
Using Moving Average Crossovers To Analyze Home Sales
In our graph above, the red line is the fastest moving trend, and we see it crosses the five year trend three times, while crossing the ten year trend only once. When it crosses a longer-term trend and goes higher, this is a bullish sign and we can expect home sales to rise. This also suggests a period of great appreciation.
When our one year trend crosses below the longer trends, this is a bearish sign and we will see the number of home sales drop. In the case of a double crossover as we are now experiencing, pricing pressures due to sluggish buyer activity has caused depreciation in the Tallahassee housing market for the first time since the early 1990s.
Tallahassee Home Sales Forecast
The greatest “positive” that I take from the graph above is that it appears as if the one year trend (red line) has spent enough time below ten year trend (blue line) and using regression toward the mean we should expect fairly continuous growth in the one year moving average for the next several years.
This conclusion also jibes with our findings in the past that link an area’s regular home sales to its population size. So expect continued bullish movements in home sales in Tallahassee, and expect another double crossover to occur in a few years or so.
In case you weren’t keeping an eye on the Market Reports page of the Tallahassee Real Estate Web Site, the new Tallahassee Home Inventory Report has been posted. This is a section of the web site dedicated to reporting “the numbers” as they occur. You might want to check out many of the daily reports [...]
December proved to be a big month for the Tallahassee real estate market. Home sales surged 81% compared to December of 2008, with 129 new units and 292 existing homes sold. Condos and townhouses were up strongly, with a developer liquidation sale great enhancing their numbers. But single family detached home sales were up 50% [...]
I have put together the “mother of all housing reports” in an effort to show our readers what is available on a regular basis at the Tallahassee Housing Reports page on our new web site. This does not even include all of the charts and graphs that we provide about foreclosures (on the Tallahassee Foreclosures [...]
Since we have entered a new year (and a new decade), it’s time to take a look at the state of the Tallahassee housing market as it stands right now. I think the mode for 2010 will be “Improvement” as many of our real estate trends are moving upwards. The key for 2010 is finding [...]
Home sales in 7 Oaks (Killearn Lakes Unit 3) continue their steady decline from the height of the boom market several years ago. Consisting of 3 and 4 bedroom, single-family detached homes, Seven Oaks has been a very popular family neighborhood in Killearn Lakes for the past 20 years. This seems to be a fairly [...]
Something positive occurred in the Tallahassee real estate market during the month of October. It was long awaited, yet one month prior to my prediction made earlier this year, so I am very excited to report REAL PROOF of a housing market improvement in Tallahassee. We finally put a halt to a run of year [...]
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