Over asking price offers

               I recently decided to look at the sales price to list price ratios for sales in Boulder County going back over the last 5 years. I know the market has changed dramatically in that time and I wanted to see how much the ratios have changed. The data is very impressive and I’ve tried with questionable success to chart it in a way that distills the information.

               The one stat in this review that really leapt out to me is the number of homes that are selling for at or over their asking price and how that has changed in the last 5 years.  Last year, more than half, almost 56% of the single family homes, sold for at or over asking. For condos, almost 75% of the sales were at or over asking. Here’s that summary.

               In just 5 years, the number of detached homes selling at or over asking has increased by 212% and for condos, that number has increased by 261%.  That is a major change for our market and one that many buyers are still adjusting to. These numbers may be slightly inflated for every time period as the data I can download doesn’t include concessions, but the price inflation due to the lack of concession information should be fairly consistent year to year.

               Here is the chart showing the change in single family sales prices to list prices.

          One of the things that jumped out to me in this chart was that the ratio peaked in 2011 at 97%.  In every year since, the peak has been at 100% of asking price. You can also see that every year since 2011, the number of homes selling for less than asking price has decreased and the number selling for over asking price has increased. This trend culminated in 2015 when we saw hundreds of homes selling for up to 5% over asking price. One other interesting quirk to the chart, you can see a big dip in the number of homes selling for 99% of asking price. I think this dip, which consistently happened every year for the last 5 years, is probably due to the psychology of the buyer seller interaction. I think this dip is due to Buyers wanting to feel like they got a deal and sellers feeling like they should get their asking price if someone is going to offer very close to it, so sales right at 99% of asking price are rarer.

          Here’s the chart for attached homes which is very similar to the detached chart. 2015 being the strongest year out of the last 5, the same quirk in the chart at 99% of asking, and greater numbers of sales over asking every year. The biggest difference is how many homes sold for over asking and how far above asking that strength extends to. In 2015 we saw large numbers of condos selling for 10% over the asking price, a strong market indeed.