Back in the days when I worked in New York City, I wore real shoes; not the sandals and flip flops that pass as footwear in Florida, but good shoes that matched my outfits and cost a tidy sum. I always felt that if you wore good shoes it didn’t matter what the rest of your outfit looked like and how much money it cost or didn’t cost – it was all about the shoes setting off everything else.
Well, the same can be said about homes. We all want our homes to show their best assets when we put them on the market and one of the very best assets that you can show off is the front lawn. First impressions do count and before a potential buyer gets out of the car, they will notice the front of the house including the landscaping, the front door and the bike with training wheels your 5-year-old left smack dab in the middle of your freshly mowed lawn. A lawn can tell you a lot about the owners of the home and their attention to the maintenance and details of the property.
The following will tell you a lot about the Manatee real estate market for October as reported by the Realtor Association of Sarasota and Manatee: Single-family homes closed were down 12.3% because of a lack of inventory. The median single-family home sold for $425,000, up 18.1% and the average sold for $565,362, up 17.5%. The median time to contract was six days and the month’s supply of properties is 0.8 months.
Condo sales were also down by 11.6% because of low inventory. The median sale price was $278,000, up 9%, and the average sale price was $330,662, up 12.2%. The median time to contract was seven days and the month’s supply of available properties was 0.6 months.
Cash sales for both single-family homes and condos remain high, with an increase of 8.5% for single-family and 10.7% for condos.
We’re kind of getting used to these great reports every month and so is the rest of the country. As reported by the National Association of Realtors, home prices climbed across the United States in the third quarter. The median sales price for single-family existing homes was higher in the quarter compared with a year before. Nationwide, the median single-family existing-home sales price rose 16% in the third quarter to $363,700 from a year earlier.
Realtor.com states that the geographic shifts that have been happening as a result of people working from home because of COVID-19 still hasn’t settled down. They feel we’re still in the early stages of these shifts and won’t know for a while where it will all end.
The Bradenton Herald reported recently that the population of Manatee County has increased more than 70,000 since the last census in 2010. I’m guessing that’s a lagging number and the actual increase in population was quite a bit more.
The chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, Lawrence Yun, says the speed of home price increases should be reduced as more homes hit the market early next year and mortgage rates continue to climb.
That might be the case nationwide, but Florida real estate is still on fire, and we’re not done yet. The President of the Realtor Association of Sarasota and Manatee said this about the October statistics: “Make no mistake – prices are going to rise in 2022, and most likely by a lot. There simply aren’t enough homes coming to market to offset the enormous demand.”
Meanwhile, don’t forget to keep your landscaping in tip-top shape; you don’t want to miss out on these fabulous selling prices. After all, your front lawn is the shoes that make the outfit.
