Ann Arbor Real Estate: Here and Now

One of the advantages to working at the most successful office at the largest real estate company in Michigan is the opportunity to get a very real representation of the pulse of the market at our weekly agent office meetings. Frankly, sometimes these meetings can be dull, but more often than not, encouraging indicators and valuable information comes out of these meetings. Yesterday's was one of the latter.

Real estate agents, are, by nature, loners, and often keep their own business and techniques close to the vest. Where our office differs is that most of our offices' top producing agents are willing to share information, strategies, and tactics to help others grow their own businesses in both good times and bad.

The subject of yesterday's meeting was: Ann Arbor Real Estate: Here and Now. It was not a 'woe is us' meeting, but was a factual analysis of the current market in the area, and a call for us to go into the marketplace and do what we do best: Bring buyers and sellers together.

The factual analysis is that the number of residential home sales in Washtenaw County (demand), in units, year over year (Year to date) for the past four years has remained pretty constant:

2008: 2,141 Units
2007: 2,130 Units
2006: 2,396 Units
2005: 2,617 Units

By contrast, over the same four year period, the number of listings on the market has dropped fairly dramatically (supply):

2008: 6,389 Listings
2007: 8,536 Listings
2006: 8,815 Listings
2005: 8,052 Listings

This scenario has played out in my own neighborhood of Briar Hill, in Pittsfield Township, which currently has 5 homes on the market, where last year there were 12 homes on the market at this time.

Long story short, the conclusion is that this narrowing of supply and demand, as indicated in the graph above, is a good market indicator, at least for Washtenaw County.

From a Buyers viewpoint, this indicates a very strong stability of the market in the Ann Arbor area. From a Sellers viewpoint, the lowering of supply means less competition when your home is on the market. From the Realtors viewpoint, while the market is challenging due to the overall economic situation, Washtenaw County has been, is, and will continue to be better than other areas of the state.