Real estate agents might have gotten a little nervous when the COVID-19 pandemic reached Mid-Missouri last spring, but it turns out 2020 was as good a year for local home sales as the previous year.
The Jefferson City Area Board of Realtors reports 1,527 single-family homes were sold in its jurisdiction during 2020 — up slightly from 1,520 in 2019 and 1,484 in 2018. The JCABOR covers Cole, Callaway, Moniteau and Osage counties.
“We were expecting a really good year, and with COVID I think there was a little bit of concern that it may really, really affect the real estate market,” said Nancy Gratz, broker associate at Gratz Real Estate & Auctioneering who was president of the Jefferson City Area Board of Realtors in 2020. “When it first started, people were just not listing because of the fear of the unknown.”
New listings slowed around last April, but things picked up during the normally busy summer months, Gratz said.
While sales appear to have held their own, not everything is “back to normal” in the real estate world.
Many agents continue to work remotely, and open houses have been rare events over the past year.
But the ongoing pandemic isn’t the only reason open houses aren’t happening as much.
“There’s very few open houses still, and I think part of the reason for that is the fact that they’re selling so quickly that you don’t even have to,” Gratz said.
With persistently low inventory, Mid-Missouri is a seller’s market, she said.
Houses in the area spent an average of 53 days on the market in 2020, according to JCABOR data — down from 59 in 2019 and 63 in 2018.
Lately, interested buyers far outpace the number of available homes in Mid-Missouri, meaning a lot of those homes sell pretty quickly, Gratz said.
“We’ve got a lot of buyers; we just don’t have enough inventory,” she said.
As of Jan. 1, there were 141 active listings for single-family homes in Central Missouri, compared to 296 a year before, according to JCABOR.
The pace of new listings varies month to month in any year. But in April 2020, for example, shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic became a local reality, there were 114 new listings, down 53.8 percent from 247 new listings in April 2019, JCABOR data show. That disparity became less stark in the following months, and by August, the monthly number of new listings was nearly identical to the previous year.
Continuing low interest rates (the average rate for 30-year fixed-rate mortgage was 3.11 percent in 2020, according to Freddie Mac), paired with some people opting to stay where they are and improve their existing homes during the pandemic, likely have contributed to the low inventory.
“It’s really the people right now that are moving in from another state that have to have a house, so they’re just bidding on everything they can, or someone else that needs to move to a bigger home or downsize,” Gratz said. “You get a home on the market, it could be on the market for one to four days and you could end up with four contracts or more. So it is nothing for homes to bring more than the listing price in 2020.”
Average selling prices, too, rose in 2020 — $188,254, compared to $171,164 in 2019 and $163,332 in 2018, according to JCABOR.
“We’re getting a few more of the higher-priced homes that are selling, which is kind of unusual, so that’s bringing it up,” Gratz said. “With them selling for more than the listing price, that automatically brings that up, too.”
Statewide, residential sales were down slightly in 2020, with 4,367 fewer homes sold than in 2019, a 4.7 percent drop, according to Missouri Realtors. But the average selling price was up statewide, at $222,661 in 2020 compared to $203,184 in 2019, a 9.6 percent increase.
As for 2021, local real estate agents remain hopeful.
“I do hope that with the vaccines and the things that we have coming forward, maybe more sellers will get out there. We’ve got the buyers; we just can’t find the sellers,” Gratz said. “I’m hoping by spring we see a bunch of changes — more people selling, being able to do more things without masks and gloves, just a little bit more back to normal.”
Recent Comments