February 2024 Vermont Market Update

February's mild weather showed us that spring is in sight! And with it, new listings and overall market activity picked up, making it look like the spring market will be returning even earlier than usual!

Noteworthy Highlights:

• Last month, new listings were up 12.5% from January and over 18% year-over-year. As we head into March and April, inventory will continue to increase keeping buyers happy since it will give them some more options to choose from. If you're thinking of selling your home soon, you may want to think about this - the most common thing we hear from sellers is they want to wait until spring to list, however if most sellers plan to list their home in the spring, it's going to lead to a surge of new inventory, which is great for buyers as mentioned, but it gives your home more competition in the market and can potentially lead to more days on the market, fewer offers and possibly even a lower selling price if you don't have those multiple offers to drive the price up.

• The median days on the market went down pretty substantially from February of last year and dropped by a couple of days from last month. Move-in-ready and more desirable properties are still selling very quickly, and properties that are overpriced or that need a bit more work are sitting for a little longer. This will continue to be true over the coming months and we should see the days on market stay steady or decrease slightly. As more inventory comes on the market, the homes that aren't as popular may have an even harder time selling and sit longer.

• The big number that stands out in this month's stats is the average sales price - decreasing by over 19%, this is quite significant! However, we think it's a bit misleading and here's why:

• In February of last year, the highest priced residential home sold for $3.3M and in February of this year, that number was down to $2.54M. Overall, the luxury market has decreased significantly over the last year with closed home sales of over $1M down by 28%. There is and has been very little new luxury inventory coming on the market, especially priced over the $1.5M mark, so those higher priced home sales aren't happening as frequently or for as high of price points, which is in turn bringing down the average.

• To give you a full picture, the total sales volume for homes listed over $1M was $21,644,000 in February of 2023 and last month it was down to only $11,875,000. That is an almost 50% decrease in sales volume coming directly from the luxury market! Yet total sales volume across our entire data set stayed fairly steady year-over-year, so we know that there were even more sales happening under $1M, more specifically under $500,000 - in February of last year 77 of the closed sales were under $500,000 while this February there were 106.

• The county that saw the largest change in their market year-over-year was by far Lamoille County - with an average sales price of $1.044M in February '23, they saw a hefty drop to just over $577,000 this February. Lamoille County is of course, well-known for its boutique ski town, Stowe, and that is what generally contributes most heavily to its luxury market sales. This year we've seen many more fractional ownership sales in Stowe which are typically below $200,000 and no sales were over $2M, whereas last February, most of the Stowe sales were over $2M and there were no fractional ownership sales. However just because the numbers are down, doesn't mean that the Stowe market isn't still healthy - many of the sales that happened this time last year were new construction and resales don't tend to happen until after the ski season (even when it's a low snow year like this one), so we'll likely see the resale market pick up in the next few months.
• Chittenden County also had a somewhat lower average sales price for the month, with more sales happening in the $300,000-500,000 range than we'd seen the year prior and very few happening over $1M.
• Since the average sales price can be so greatly affected by the outliers (the highest and lowest priced home sales), if we look at the median sales price, we see that it is down just 5.5% year-over-year, which is what we would consider to be a much more accurate representation of the market as a whole.

Want to know more about the current market, where it's headed, and what your options are? Or just want to chat about real estate in general? Reach out, we'd love to talk further!

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