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Lilburn, GA Market Report, December 2010

Saturday, 15 January 2011 08:07
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Sunrise in Lilburn
Image by mjp* via Flickr

Market stats for Lilburn, December, 2010, indicates that there are 379 properties on the market (as of December 31st). Overall, there is about a 10.9 month supply of properties.  Lilburn is actually mid-pack among cities in Gwinnett County.  The Absorption Rates had been getting worse since August, but December clocked an improvement from 11.8 months of inventory in November.  In March there were 15.3 months of inventory.

In the sub-$200k arena, there are 244 listings, with about an 8.0 month supply.  This represents most of the sales in the market area, and reflects the same improvement in inventory levels, continuously since March, until October.  Sales were drastically higher than December 2009 (31 v 22).  Oddly, the Absorption Rate is exactly the same as a year ago.

Between $200k and $400k, there are 114 listings for sale, and about 28.5 months of supply. This segment has been quite weak for months.  Having 0 sales in December, and only 6 each on November and October didn’t help.  For comparison, in 2009 there were 18 sales in October, 9 in November and 7 in December.  The expected end of the tax credit last year started pushing sales down in Nov. 2009.  While the Absorption Rate got slightly better compared to last month, the change was marginal.

From $400k to $600k, there are 16 homes on the market. The absorption rate is around 48 months. There  were no sales in this segment in May, June, July, October or December this year.  There were only 4 sales in August and September(combined). November had 1 sale (2 last year). Last summer was much stronger overall.  With just a few sales, just one or two can make a huge difference.

From $600k to $800k, $800k to $1M and Above $1M, there are 5 listings (combined), but too few sales to have any sort of reliable number of months of inventory.  There has been one sale in the last five months, but prior, there had only been a few other sales in 2010 (January, March and August).  One of the listings is above $1M (none between $800k and $1M), and there is no market activity in the last 12 months for that range…

Lilburn is in Gwinnett County, GA, just outside of Atlanta.  As of the 2000 Census, there were 11,307 people in Lilburn, but that is only including people in the city limits, and there has been a lot of growth since 2000 in Gwinnett County.  It was incorporated in 1910.  Lilburn is home to Parkview High School, and also has students that the Brookwood, Berkmar and Meadowcreek clusters. It is also home to Killian Hill Christian School, Providence Chrisian Academy, St. John Neumann Catholic School and Parkview Christian School.  Possibly the most famous resident of Lilburn is General Beauregard Lee, a groundhog with a better winter prediction record that Puxatawnee Phil up in PA. Dominique Wilkins, formerly of the Atlanta Hawks also lives in Lilburn.

I have a page dedicated to Lilburn Market Data.

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Photo Friday… Driving on the Ice

Friday, 14 January 2011 08:59
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Even if you don’t live around Atlanta, you’d have to be hiding under a rock not to have heard about our weather this week.  It has been pretty wild.  Snow and Ice…

We got ice, followed by snow… followed by ice.  Then melt and refreeze.  Lots of ice.

That is one of the primary differences between “Southern Snow Events” and what happens up north.  Almost whenever we have snow there is ice.  I used to live in Minnesota, and in my 6 winters there was one ice storm.  We usually have one a year here in Georgia.

And that is a double edged sword.  With one ice storm a year, and few other snowfalls, investing millions of dollars in snow removal and salt/sand spreaders doesn’t make economic sense.

But, the cities and counties also don’t have adequate plans to deal with the roads.  Front-end loaders are effective at removing snow in downtown areas.  Graders are effective at removing snow on other streets.  And honestly, it doesn’t cost that much to equip government dump trucks with plow racks and blades.

But then there are the people…  the GBR 4WD Club (of which I am a member) helped to get supplies and staff to 5 area hospitals.  Local people and businesses stepped up to help people stuck at the airport and bus station because of the weather.  Neighbors checked in on each other to make sure that they all had food and any needed medications.  Neighbors even got together to clear roads in their neighborhoods so that school buses would have an easier time when school started back up.

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I’m Always Up For a Good Surprise..

Thursday, 13 January 2011 08:56
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2005 29 Jan - Atlanta Ice Storm - Spring St. (...
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I was working over the market data for Gwinnett County, GA… outside of Atlanta.  And the numbers were a bit surprising.  They were good… Almost across the board…

Why am I not excited?  I want to be excited.  I want to shout to the world that Gwinnett County’s real estate market has turned.

But I’m skeptical…

Generally, December has to lowest number of listings that we are going to see throughout the year.  Seldom will we see an increase in listings… in fact, only in the high end (where listings are often on the market over a year) do we see around the same number of listings in December as in November or January.

But this year, there was a dramatic dip in November, related to October.  There was just as dramatic of an uptick for December , compared to November.

So, was November an anomaly or was December the odd duck?

2005 29 Jan - Atlanta Ice Storm - North Ave Br...
Image via Wikipedia

My honest guess is that December is the odd one out.  Looking at the last several month, it seems obvious.  Here are the sales percentages vs the same month in 2009. Keep in mind, this is after the tax credit expired.

  • August – Down 11.5%
  • September – Down 22.6%
  • October – Down 24.0%
  • November – Down 27.3%
  • December – Down 4.0%

Obviously, that is quite strong.  But is real?  It will take a while to figure out.  We’ll have a better idea in a month or so, when the January numbers solidify, but we will still be looking at an “unstimulated” market compared to the market last year which was paying a $8,000 Tax Credit for First Time Home Buyers, and $6,500 for Existing Home Buyers.  So, it will be September or October before we really can compare 2010 numbers with 2011 numbers and see an honest comparison.

I’m Hopeful…

I certainly have reservations.  I am mentally preparing for a boomerang in January numbers.  But I remain hopeful.  I’m looking forward to the January reports, which will come out starting in mid-February.

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Gwinnett County GA Overall Market Report… November, 2010

Monday, 10 January 2011 08:55
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Gwinnett County Historic Courthouse, Lawrencev...
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Here are the final numbers for Gwinnett County Home sales for November, 2010.

At the end of November, 2010, there were 6,017 homes on the market in Gwinnett County, GA.  As usual, we have a drop off in listings during the Holiday Season.  November listings were down from October.  December also showed a decrease.  While this is a lot of listings, it is low compared to the 10,000+ listings that were on the market a couple of years ago.  There were 488 sales in November.  This was down from 716 sales for November, 2009.  Averaging the result for the last three months yielded an Absorption Rate of 11.2 months of inventory, which has been steadily increasing since June (this isn’t an increase that is good).  This has been pretty consistent across the board on price and location segments, although not exactly the same in all areas.

The Under $200,000 market segment was the meat in this sandwich.  For November, it represented 3,943 homes listed.  There were 231 sales during that period.  So, active listings went up (bad) and sales were WAY down (very bad).  Averaging the last three month gave the segment an Absorption Rate of 11 months.  The rate has been rising since May (rather than the more “market normal” June), having bottomed at just under 7.2 months of inventory.  Year over year sales for October were down from 496 in November, 2009.

In the $200,000 to $400,000 range, there were 1,537 listings county-wide.  The Absorption Rate, currently at about 15.5 months of inventory, has been rising since August.  And while sales are down, listings are down, too.  Year over year sales were down significantly, 69 for 2010 v 171 for 2009.  In effect, while there are less than half of the listings of the next lower market segment, there are barely more than a third of the sales.

Between $400,000 and $600,000, there were 320 listings in Gwinnett County and 8 sales for November, 2010.  Again, the Absorption Rate had been basically dropping since March, 2010, but jumped up significantly based on weak sales in both October and November.  Currently it indicates about 45.7 months of inventory.  Inventories are down slightly, but sales are abysmal v last year.  For November, 2009, there were 34 sales.

In the $600,000 to $800,000 strata, the Absorption Rate indicates 72 months of inventory.  That rate has been rising since July (it was 10 months, then).  But, in February there was a 38 month inventory of properties.  For November, there were 72 listings in this price range.  There was 1 sale… down from 9 in November, 2009.

As we move up to the $800,000 to $1,000,000 price level of Gwinnett County, GA, homes for sale, we see that there were 49 active listings and 2 sales for November, 2010.  This has an indicated Absorption Rate of 82 months of inventory.  Because the sales at this price level are less consistent than at lower levels, the rate bounces around a lot.  But, there is an upward trend in the absorption rate… which isn’t good.

On the top level, Over $1,000,000, there were 96 listings and 1 sale for November, 2010.  Here we have seen the Absorption Rate on the increase, despite the inventory dropping.  For August there was about 36 months of inventory.  Sales are down significantly from last year (when there were 3 sales…).  Since this is a very wide range (prices from $1,000,000 to over $10,000,000), there are more listings and sales than the next level down.  Also, the homes are generally harder to compare because this realm is populated with custom homes and “one-offs”.

I’m looking forward to seeing the sales data for December soon.  It will take quite a while before we get out of comparing to numbers that were skewed by government subsidies and stimulus.

You might have noticed that these reports lag by a month to a month and a half.  The reason for the lag is that it takes until the end of the following month for the data to stabilize.  So, the data for November wasn’t very solid until the beginning of January.  I have tried to use preliminary data, but it always seemed to veer at the last minute…

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Lane’s Prognostications for 2011…

Saturday, 08 January 2011 08:24
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Real Estate = Big Money
Image by thinkpanama via Flickr

We’ll see how well I peg this.

Lane’s Predictions for 2011…

Looking back over the last year or two in real estate market reports, there are a few things that have been jumping out at me.

  • For over two years I have been hearing about the millions of homes in “Shadow Inventory”.  These are properties in the foreclosure process, or already foreclosed, that the banks are basically sitting on, waiting until “the market improves” before releasing them into the market.  I predict that next year there will STILL be people talking about the coming giant wave of Shadow Inventory. It isn’t that there isn’t a shadow inventory, but that we have dropped from over 10,000 homes on the market in Gwinnett County, GA to around 6,000.  Even for the overall Atlanta Metro area, we have gone from 120,000 homes to under 70,000.
  • The federal government has been borrowing unheard of amounts of money for the last few years.  Much of it has come from China and other foreign investors… but the deficit spending is not coming to an end, while the depth of the investment pool is…  Despite the best attempts of the Fed, Interest Rates ARE going to rise. Currently we are seeing rates under 5%.  I expect that we will be looking at closer to 7% by the end of the year.
  • Looking at the market reports, there are a few things that are VERY obvious.
    • Government Stimulus for the Housing Market only provides a temporary bump… and then it is worse than it was before, but there will be another wave of government intervention I hope I am wrong on this one).
    • The entry level market (under $200k) is well on the way to recovery… and that will continue. We won’t really know it until around September or October because it will be masked by the tax credits in 2010.
    • Meanwhile, it has been a rough ride for the luxury market.  And I don’t think we will see a meaningful recovery in prices for the Luxury Market (above $600k). There is a lot of downward pressure on this segment, and while there are some signs of strength, the best that segment can hope for is stagnation.
    • The “Near Luxury” segment (from $200k-$600k) will be mixed. It is also the market to watch for signs of permanent recovery.  I know that I will be watching the $200k-$400k and $400k-$600k segments to try to glean the health of the overall market.
  • I fully believe that unemployment (or rather employment) is at the center of the struggle in the Housing Market, and not the other way around.  Until the Unemployment rate drops, housing cannot really recover.  I don’t see Unemployment going under 9% during 2011. In fact, unless something changes radically, I don’t think it will even get that close (maybe 9.3%).

I’ll probably have a few more predictions before long…

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