Greater Hartford January 2009 Real Estate Market Statistics

One month ends and another begins, so that must mean it’s time for some more real estate statistics for the Greater Hartford area. As always, data comes from the CT Multiple Listing Service, is deemed reliable but not guaranteed, and is for single family homes only. Here is the data and let me just say the results are not pretty. My analysis follows after the chart…


January 2009 Greater Hartford Real Estate Market Statistics

My observations…

1. First off, let me just warn you that there were so few transactions in some of the towns that this data is not very statistically relevant, particularly the Median Sale Price and Days on Market columns. I am simply including these two columns because I’ve done so in the past and people like to see the data. Those two buckets are much more relevant on a quarterly basis, so just keep that in mind. That being said, when you combine the number of sales for the towns and look at the actual inventory in each of the towns, there is a story being told. So let’s talk about that story.

2. I don’t know what the heck people were doing in January, but for the most part, they weren’t closing on houses. That makes sense given the fact that the number of pending sales (accepted contracts) in November and December were way down. Aggregating the data for these towns, the number of closed sales was down 40% in January 2009 compared to January 2008. And January of 2008 was off 25% from January of 2007. Bleh. That’s depressing.

3. Looking at the Months of Inventory column, I used the last 3 months of closed sales to calculate this figure. This is somewhat of a worst case scenario because the last 3 months were anemic in closed sales. Sometimes the previous 6 months is used, which would make the data look slightly better, but I think 6 months is too long of a timeframe, particularly in this type of market. So, a Buyer’s Market is typically indicated by 6 months or more of inventory. Given this, each of these towns would be classified as a Buyer’s Market. Remember that certain price ranges and neighborhoods may still be selling briskly, but when you aggregate all of a town’s listings, the advantage is with the Buyer right now.

4. Mortgage rates rose slightly during the past week, see the chart below from Raveis Mortgage. But buyers are still active because rates continue to be historically low.


Raveis Mortgage- Weekly Historical Rates

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