The market is up. The market is down. If the first two sentences were re written as questions, the answers to both would in fact be yes. The total dollar amount of property sold over the first four months of 2015 has swung wildly when compared to the dollar volume of sales for the same period in the previous year.
January up 41%. February, down 26%. March up 34%. April down 52%. Sales through April $488,997,567, 14% fewer dollars have been spent on Vail area Real Estate than over the same period of 2014. Yet, the number of properties sold is up 3%.
So are prices falling? No. Closer examination of the market sales statistics reveals that the local market is undergoing a transition. For several years local markets have been buoyed by the sales of high end properties. Though few in number, these sales can have a large effect on statistics, particularly during the winter months which typically see fewer sales transactions so the large dollar amounts of a few sales have an outsized effect on the total sales numbers for the area. Now the trend may be changing away from only very high end properties moving, to high quality properties selling in more regularly priced markets as well. Definitely take note of the fact that homes priced under a half a million dollars have really begun to take off. So much so that homes in that price range have doubled their share of the total market since the new year began. This is exciting because when, people buy $150,000 one bedroom condominiums, they allow the sellers of those condos to go out and buy $250,000 two bedroom condos which allows the sellers of those properties to move up the ladder as well. In a resort community such as Vail this spreading of economic prosperity across a widening base increases the quality of life for all and even strengthens the prices of homes priced higher on the pyramid.
The fluctuating nature of the sales trends shows that we are not entirely out of the woods quite yet. The strengthening of the base of the housing market means that we are now even closer to the point in time where real estate prices have recovered to their 2006 levels across all segments of the markets.
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