The slowdown in the real estate market has shown up in the real estate statistics in 2023 in Estes Park. There are a lot of reasons for pessimism, but there are equally as many reasons to still be optimistic about our market here in the mountains. Let’s dig into the details and I'll show you what I mean.
Real Estate Market Details
for Estes Park
Starting Off
First of all, the market as a whole saw significantly fewer real estate sales in 2023 than 2022 with a drop of approximately 12% in the total number of sales. Going back in the history, we haven’t had so few sales since 2012. With fewer sales, we are fortunate that inventory of homes for sale did not skyrocket during that time. Therefore our prices did not respond to the dramatic drop in the number of sales but actually rose by 3% because nobody wanted to sell their properties. Separating out the single family homes from the condos, single family fell in median values by a small amount, but condominiums surged ahead even with the significant drop in number of sales.
As I have been predicting for years, as the number of sales has declined, values have stayed relatively constant but the average time on the market has increased. The power of the 2ndhome market is at play here where people who own these second homes have much more financial capability to withstand a slower market and therefore would rather wait for their home to sell at their price than reduce the price to sell quickly. The other interesting number is that the price per square foot was up consistently at about 5% in both Single family and condominiums.
As the cost of construction skyrocketed after 2020, the number of vacant land sales dwindled as well. It has always been more cost effective to buy an existing home and remodel it rather than start from scratch. That being said, the number of sales in the vacant land category is bordering on being statistically insignificant. When we have just a few sales that are outside the norm, it can greatly skew the resulting statistics. You can see this play out by looking at the median sale and the average sale for vacant land being drastically different.
