Greenwich Real Estate's Four Markets; 33 Open Houses Sunday

Contracts bode well for future in most price categories; No sales of houses in the more than $10 million market.

Posted by Mark Pruner, March 10, 2013 at 02:54 pm

We’ve talked about how hot the lower end of the market is hot and how slow the upper end of the market is, but when you look at the market in a little more detail, you see there are four markets.

With only two months of sales these markets become even clearer when you look at the accepted offers and pending contracts.

Lower End of Market: Under $1.5 million

Under $1.5 million sales are so good that that the height of the sales bars and the sales with contracts are almost the same. We’ve got a busy market that will get a little busier, but given that most deals in this price range require financing closings can’t happen much quicker.

Mid-Market: $1.5 - $3 million

As an example of why it’s better, check out both sales and contracts in the $1.5 - $2 million price range. Sales have been a little slow in this price range, but when you add in the contracts you can see that this segment will improve nicely in the near future. The $2 – 3 million price range is the heart of the Greenwich real estate market with 73 listings as of the beginning of March. When you add in the pending contracts you are looking at around 8 – 9 months of supply.

$3 – 5 million market

This market is moving along, but we still have over a year’s supply with around 16 months of supply when you add in the contracts for sales. Much of this market is driven by Wall Street and hedge fund bonuses. Last year wasn’t a great year for the publicly traded financial companies bonus payments, but we also have the Dow-Jones Industrial average hitting all time highs this week. So if this trends continues I expect that we will see executives taking a portion of their deferred comp to make some down payments.

High-End Market $5 million +

In the $5 – 10 million range, we have more than two years supply of houses. When you look at contracts it doesn’t look like this category will be getting better soon. The over $10 million market is literally off the chart. Of the 47 houses for sale in Greenwich over $10 million as of the beginning of March, not one had sold. Now this price category takes awhile to warm up each year, but no sales is not a good sign.

The Raw Sales and Inventory Numbers

Months of Supply aka the absorption rate can be a difficult concept so let’s look at the raw numbers. Under $600,000, we have 12 houses and in the first two months of 2013, we have had 4 sales. So if we didn’t get any more and sales continue at this rate all the listings under $600,000 would be sold in 3 three months. You can see the that purple bar (YTD sales) is 1/3^rd the height of the blue line in this price range on the inventory chart.

You can also see how different YTD sales compare to the inventory. In the lower ranges we don’t have much inventory (blue bars) and we have good sales (green bars). At the higher end we have decent sales numbers, but we have much larger inventories, so the months of supply is much higher. I’ve been showing houses in the $2 – 3 million range and it is certainly nice to have some options to show.

Greenwich open house list for Sunday, March 10:

This Sunday we have 35 open houses in all parts of the town and all price ranges.

The open house list and the interactive map are courtesy of Rob Pulitano. The hot links are courtesy of Jared Randall.

Address

Town

List Price

Open House Time

Broker

2 Homestead Lane #112

Greenwich

$345,000

2-4 PM