Increasing Price Changes?

I frequently will feel something in the market and then look to the stats to see if my feeling is confirmed with hard numbers. Lately, it has felt like I’m seeing a lot more price reductions as sellers try to navigate the “summer slump”. Luckily for a little over two years now, I’ve been tracking the New Listings, the Price Changed Listings, the Back on Market Listings, the Sold Listings and the Off-Market Listings for all of the Boulder County properties in IRES.

So, did the feeling of seeing more price reductions show in the data? Yes and a dramatic change in the trend as you can see in the chart below. Price reductions had been very low since December 2020 and then this June, the number of listings with price changes more than doubled and now just over 13% of all Active listings are having a price reduction. If we look back to 2019 as a “normal” year, these higher 2021 numbers are below the gross number of the 2019 price reductions, but due to our much lower Active 2021 Inventory, a higher percentage of properties than at this time of the year in 2019.

Another sign of the summer slump, our Percentage of Single Family Homes in Boulder County that are under contract continues to fall. As you can see in the chart below, many years we have a fall bounce in the UC % and we’ll be watching to see if we get that bounce this year as we exit the “summer slump”. I think how the remainder of this year plays out will tell us a lot about how early 2022 will play out. If we have the typical fall bump, I expect early 2022 to be very active, if instead we just watch market activity decelerate through New Year’s, I could see early 2022 being much slower than the past several years.

Still hearing of lots of people – buyers, sellers and brokers – tell me they are out of town on summer travel, which I believe is a big contributor to this summer’s slump. We’ll be watching to see how that activity resumes this fall when we all get back to work and school.
Be well!