Covid-19 Weekly Market Updates #12

Welcome to June! It was announced today that the Washington State Secretary of Health has accepted Whatcom County’s application to move on to Phase 2 of the Washington’s Safe Start Plan. You can read a broad explanation of what that means here, and here are a few key changes:

• Lets you have 5 people inside household
• Restaurants can open to 50% capacity (with no bar seating)
• Real Estate, Nail Salons, and Barbers can open

I will also explain below what that means specifically for my business and the real estate world.

New Listings for both 2019 and 2020 increased over the last week: This is typical, healthy trend as we get further into a spring market!

• 115 → 133 in 2019
• 69 → 86 in 2020

Below is an accounting of all of the active listings on the market in our three major markets along with all of the sales that went under contract from 5/30 to 6/5/20 (pulled around Noon PST) and the percentage relationship between those numbers.

Numbers are still hovering around the same general areas. If I had to guess I would see we will see our Under Contract Sales % creep up as everyone gets more comfortable moving into phase 2!

The second chart represents the Average Days on Market (ADOM) for the homes that are currently active and that went under contract between 5/30/20 and 6/5/20. “Days on Market” is how long the home was active on the market before the seller accepted an offer.

As in a normal market there’s some fluctuation week-to-week in the DOM for the under contract sales. It will be interesting to see if the Difference in Days changes at all as we move into Phase 2!

The last set of data below is the average prices of the active listings and the average prices of the homes that went under contract last week. What we are mostly paying attention to here is how the % difference is changing from week to week to see how COVID-19 might be affecting the offer price that homes receive.

Yet again, Lynden is having homes go under contract that are priced higher than the average priced active home in the area. Bellingham had some lower priced homes go under contract this week that brought an 11% change!