Selling On Cape Cod

February Review: Well, it's been an interesting week. Let's take a look at how changes in the larger economy and continuing market trends are shaping the upcoming Spring real estate season on Cape Cod. Days on Market nearly doubled last month. In February, single family homes took 86% longer to sell than the same period last year. This trend of increasing days on market has persisted since June. Percent of Original Price may be stabilizing. This metric indicates buyers'

January Review: The Cape Cod housing market showed some interesting changes compared to January 2022 as well as compared to the past few months. We have been monitoring a few metrics in particular and they showed... Percent of Original Price continues to decline. This illustrates that homes are selling for less than the asking price, 6% less than asking price in January. After years of market frenzy and multiple offers over asking price, this indicator is returning to his

The Cape Cod Real Estate market closed out 2022 continuing the trend of higher prices and lower inventory that has played out over the last decade. In fact, we closed 2022 with the lowest number of homes for sale (~580) and the highest prices (~$639,000) ever for the Cape market. For comparison, the last market peak in 2006-2008 saw ~5,700 units selling for a median price of ~$375,000, a 90% decrease and 170% increase, respectively. However, these sales data conceal an underl

Greetings from us at Chatelain Real Estate. We have had the pleasure of providing you the support you have needed in your real estate ventures over the years. We look forward to continuing to help as we have through the past three decades. A most sincere thank you from every one of us for entrusting us with your real estate needs. We are excited to welcome a new member of our team, our office Intern, Katie Toto. She is a graduating senior at Dennis Yarmouth Regional High Scho

Happy New Year! December Review: December closed out 2022 with few surprises in the Cape Cod Real Estate Market. Here are a few relevant points. Percent of Original Price is on the decline. For context, this metric is the first asking price at which a seller markets their home and it has been declining since May. This indicates that sellers are overpricing their homes and reducing the asking price before they find a buyer. Additionally... Homes are taking more Days on M

October and November Review: The end of the year is shaping up to be much as we expected. Inventory remains tight as both sellers and and buyers concentrate on the holidays more than selling or purchasing homes. As a result, we have been seeing inventory dwindle, yet we are also now seeing some other interesting trends emerge. First, the "Average Days on Market" is up to 36 from its low of 17 in June. Houses taking longer to sell is not necessarily a bad thing as i

September Review: The Cape Cod real estate market continues the trend of low inventory, high prices, and favoring sellers. While inventory is up from the low last winter, it is still on par with 2021, meaning we haven't seriously started to improve this aspect of the market by increasing the number of homes for sale. Additionally, new listings are down nearly 20% compared to last year so we don't anticipate this low inventory changing in the near term. Larger econo

August Review: The Cape Cod real estate market remains low on inventory and high on confusion. We have been inundated these last weeks with requests for a quick look into our crystal ball and an idea about when the top, or bottom, of the market will be. Unfortunately our crystal ball only reliably predicts the next day of the week. The driving force in the Cape Cod real estate market continues to be low inventory. How larger economic trends will impact the cost of borr

July Review: The Cape Cod real estate market remains heavily seller favored with low inventory, high prices and quick sales. However, as we noted last month, the furious buyer demand seems somewhat tempered. When we look at not only inventory, but also months supply of inventory, we see number of homes in the market is increasing and sales are slowing down, as evidenced by fewer closed and pending sales. While these buyer favored trends are appearing, they are complete

May and June Review -- Double Issue: Well we're back after taking a brief hiatus last month. So what's been going on in the Cape Cod real estate market for the past two months? Much the same as before but with some signs of change. Let's jump in. The real estate market lacks a healthy amount of inventory. This has been the story for years, even before the pandemic; however, COVID exacerbated the problem and the market has not yet recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Median

April Review: The Cape Cod real estate market remains crazy. Median price continues to climb and metrics such as inventory and new listings remain low. Don't be deceived by the bump in inventory between March and April either. True enough there were 324 single family homes for sale at the end of April; however, fewer than 100 of those were on the market for less than $739,000. The only foreseeable consequence to inventory so low is continued upward pressure on sales pr

March Review: The Cape Cod real estate market continues to languish in abysmally low inventory levels. For comparison, the number of homes for sale in March in Barnstable county in the years before the pandemic were; 2017 : 2,412 --- 2018 : 1,971 --- 2019 : 2,288 --- 2020 : 1,996. The inventory in March (and at the time of writing) was 274 homes, an order of magnitude fewer homes than what was an already low inventory market in 2017-2020. As long as inventory remains

February Review: We hate sounding like a broken record, but here goes anyway. Inventory is as low as we have seen and continues to decline. When drilling down into homes less than $650k, the dearth is even more concerning. At the time of writing (3/15), there are 38 single family homes for sale in Barnstable County for less than $650k. New listings are not coming on the market at a rate needed to replenish inventory and larger market trends that we are watching, i.e. t

January Review: The Cape Cod real estate market continues its trends of high prices and low inventory, but there may be a change in the air...or not. The graphic at right illustrates how the market compares to January 2021. If you can remember that far back, January was the start of the true frenzy before "Percent of Original Price Received" peaked in the early summer (June 2021). Since then, prices are even higher and inventory even lower. However, we are tracking a f

December Review: December closed out 2021 much as expected, with low inventory and continued high prices; however, there are a few things worth pointing out. First, the seasonal supply curve in 2021 followed the more typical trend seen before the pandemic. This seasonality sees more homes come on the market in the Spring, Summer and early Fall while new listings taper off in the later fall and winter. While the annual inventory cycle seems to be returning, it is coupled wi

November Review: We are running out of superlatives to describe the Cape Cod real estate market at this point. Median Sales price continues to climb and is at an all time high for single-family homes, $660,000. Months supply of inventory is just over one month, and less than a month for homes less than $650,000 -- remember that 5-6 months worth of inventory felt tight in 2018 and 2019, so 1 months worth of inventory is abysmally limited. Sellers are still receiving nearly

October Review: The Cape Cod real estate market remains starved for inventory which continues to drive prices up. However there is good news if you are a buyer (and frankly we are a long way off from bad news for sellers). First, homes are spending longer on the market (30 days) than they were at the minimum in June (22 days). Second, the % of asking price received is decreasing (now at 99.8%) from the peak in June (103%). Homes spending longer on the market and receivin

Sept Review: The Cape Cod real estate market is slowly becoming more predictable, though it is far from what we had been used to. Let's take a look at how the market has been evolving for the past few months. First, median sales price remains at record highs and is steadily increasing. We have seen median sales price increase overall since Feb 2009 when the housing bubble burst so this is not especially surprising and we expect prices to continue to increase, especially wi

Aug Review: August saw the continued increase in single family home inventory; however because of the high amount of buyer activity, the added number of homes for sale was not enough to improve the months supply of inventory (which is now at 1.4 months). The short story, low inventory continues to drive the real estate market on Cape Cod. Tracking other metrics, we saw median sales price remain high, though not as high as the peak of $654k back in March. "Days on Marke

July Review: The real estate market on Cape Cod continues with the same trends we have now seen for months. Inventory is (very) slowly creeping up but remains far too low to meet demand from buyers. By comparison, in July 2020, there were 1,184 single family homes on the market, in July 2021, it was only 544. Currently single family home supply is at 1.3 months, which is about as unbalanced in favor of sellers as the market can be ("said the writer, foolishly, while gl