“And all at once, summer collapsed into fall.” ~ Oscar Wilde
We couldn’t agree more, Oscar. Our dog days are now behind us as we have snowy peaks, fiery orange and bright yellow trees (that never last long enough) lighting up our forests and taking our breath away. While leaves are falling, a little snow is falling and some prices are falling; interest rates are not yet falling as much as we’d like. However, we are encouraged by the Federal Reserve’s first quarter point cut in rate on Sept 17th.
We like to remind our friends and clients that while rate cuts don’t directly cause 30-year mortgage rates to drop, they can influence them over time. Other factors, like inflation and employment, also affect mortgage rates. We’ve had lender friends say “stay tuned” and look to possibly refinance or lock into a lower rate “coming soon.”
More falling items we are seeing in some of our market sectors are prices. Some sellers are getting a bit more antsy to move their property before winter season, so price reductions are becoming more common. We will likely see some listings come off market for the winter and either become rentals or perhaps sellers will enjoy the property instead of accumulating more days on market. This isn’t the case in every sector where there continue to be hot spots.
The single family home market in the greater Winter Park Area is up in overall volume by 37% and average sales price is up from 1.621M to 1.859M. The Granby area and Hot Sulphur Springs Area sales volume are up as well while average sales price in Granby has remained flat at just over 1M, HSS has jumped from 558K to 671K. Grand Lake Area home sales dollars are down slightly but average sales price jumped 7% from 935K to just over 1M. Multi family (townhomes and condos) are pretty much down in all areas and in unit sales and volume. We don’t have any metrics pointing to why this is the case and we’ve had some really stellar years recently so we will continue to follow this trend but aren’t overly concerned- it’s just a cycle like everything else in real estate.
There is plenty under construction and still a lot of activity and sales- we are just not keeping the pace of the past 36 months. To close it out, land sales volume has been off the charts across the County especially in the Winter Park, Hot Sulphur Springs and Kremmling areas. Building has been going gangbusters all over the county as has road construction.
Time to bump your heat up if you’ve had it off all summer and start thinking about finding those boots and hats. If you haven’t made it up for some leaf peeping- hurry up before it’s too late because one big wind event and it’s all done until next year. And on that note….I’m headed outside!
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