October 3, 2023

By Isabel Guzman, Realtor®

Video Transcription

Most homeowners want to keep up with how the real estate market is performing, right? They want to know what trends are occurring or simply whether or not homes are selling. Now, why does this intrigue us so much? Well, because this is a way we can kind of gauge what is occurring to the value of our

property, right? Our equity. In this video I will be presenting to you a market update. But guess what? This video will not be a generic, general market update on what is occurring in the real estate market in the city of New Braunfels, but rather, I will be digging deeper and more specifically talk to you about the real estate market as it pertains to only 1 Acre Homes.

Plus in the city of New Braunfels. And let me take a moment and point out that you will not see this information publicized anywhere else, simply because no one takes the time to carve out these micro statistics, this micro data. But I know that it is extremely important to truly monitor what is happening with homes on one acre or more in the city of New Braunfels if you truly want to understand this market, right? Why?

Because the market on homes on property can often be significantly different than your

typical market in our area. Hi, I'm Isabel Guzman and I specialize in helping people like you sell or purchase property on acreage here in New Braunfels, Texas. Welcome to my video and let's jump right in! Let me start off by disclosing that I have a bachelor's in accounting, which means that I can really geek out on statistics and numbers— but I promise that I will do my best to keep this video very simple and short and sweet. So, again, this is not a traditional market update.

This is data that is not generated by one entity; in fact, this is data that I took the time to abstract from one of our local MLS boards.

So I had to ask myself and generate what are some of the numbers that I believe would be important to review. What I decided to do is review the last 12 months from August of 2022 through September of 2023 and compare that to the last calendar year that was normal before the pandemic: so I'm talking about calendar year 2019.

Again, in this video I will review what has occurred in the market in the last 12 months and compare that to the last pre-pandemic calendar year of 2019.

Some of you may be wondering why I decided to compare all the way back to 2019 and this is because we all know that the pandemic caused kind of havoc in the real estate market, right? We all saw that homes were selling in one day, sometimes in hours, sometimes with many multiple offers and significantly over asking price. Now what we are seeing is the market starting to normalize, so it would not be appropriate to compare what's happening now to the last couple of years. Because what we saw during the pandemic will likely never happen again anytime soon—or even in our lifetime.

The great news is that those of you who kept your home during the pandemic years very likely accrued a nice chunk of equity. Let me emphasize: the dust is starting to settle, right? We are still seeing high inflation and high interest rates so it's not to say that the dust has settled completely, but it's definitely normalizing the market.

So let's take a look!

I'm sure that you have been watching the news and keep hearing about how the real estate market keeps on turning down, how there's negative news out there, but you'll see that it's not as bad as the headlines make it out to be. For example, let's talk about the number of homes sold in the last 12 months compared to the number of homes sold in 2019.

Well, the number of homes sold in the last 12 months were 277 homes. Compare this to 373 total home sold in calendar year 2019. This is a 25% decrease, which clearly tells us that inventory remains low. So what are we seeing here? People are hanging on to their homes. It's very likely that having that 3% or 2.something% interest rate will cause inventory to remain low for quite some time.

Less inventory means that it's most likely going to remain more of a Seller's Market. Remember, we are still technically in a Seller's Market: homes are taking 60, 40 days to sell, which still constitutes a Seller's Market. Now this is a very interesting number: let's look at the average sold price of the last year which was $927,156.

Now, remember this is the average sold price of one or more acre homes sold right here in New Braunfels. Compare this to the average in 2019 of $537,773. That represents a 72% increase.

What does this mean? It means that people's equity truly did increase! On a national level, homeowners have an average of $300,000 in their value but this represents a $389,000 value on homes on one acre or more here in New Braunfels.

What about the Average Days on Market? I thought this was also an interesting statistic. So, for the last 12 months the average days on market—which means when the house went for sale and when the they received their contract—was 90 days in the last 12 months, compared to 94 days in the calendar year of 2019. It is right about the same, but technically lower in the last 12 months, which means that homes are selling even a little bit faster than they were in 2019. Yes, they are not selling in 2 or 3 days like they were during the pandemic, but we must remember that those were not normal years.

Let's talk about the Maximum Days on Market in the last 12 months, which was 371 days, compared to the Maximum Days on Market for 2019. Guess what? That was 625 days! What we're seeing here is that in 2019 it took some sellers 254 extra days to sell, compared to what we're seeing today. Now this number can be a little bit skewed because we may have had, likely, more new construction homes um selling in 2019 but it's still significantly larger, that it has to influence the market overall.

Now let me take a moment to give you a snapshot of what is happening right now as it stands in the 1Acre Plus Market right here in New Braunfels, Texas.

So what are we seeing? We have a total of 130 homes available for sale—active—in New Braunfels, and an additional 21 homes that are pending, that are under contract. That's a total of 151 homes for sale right now in New Braunfels that are on 1 acre or more. And if you do the math and we go back to what sold in the last 12 months, which we said was 277, we are on trend to sell even less this year. So again, we are still seeing a low inventory rate in the market overall but specifically here for the 1 Acre Plus Homes in New Braunfels. Now the average list price of the total current homes in the market right now which, again we said were 151, is $1,243,409.

Now compare this to the last sold price of the last 12 months of $927,156. Now, what does that tell me? A trend that I started to see once the market started stabilizing is that some homeowners continued listing their homes at a price as if we were still in the pandemic, which I think is clearly demonstrated here on the Average List Price compared to the Average Sold Price in the last 12 months.

So as you can see, the average list price is significantly higher than what the average sold price is, which also tells me why I am seeing so many price reductions. Because ultimately it doesn't matter where you list, your home will sell only at market value. The last number that I want to talk to you about is the average days on Market on those 21 pending homes that I spoke to you about. Again, remember we have 130 1 Acre Plus homes for sale in New Braunfels but an additional 21 homes that are under contract.

Well, out of those 21 homes that are under contract, their average days on market was 78 days. Again, this is from the day that it went live on the market to the day it received a contract, which is 78 days, which is significantly lower than 90 days, which is the average days on market for the last 12 months. So in summary, what I'd like to say is the 1 Acre Plus Home Market is strong in New Braunfels.

Yes, homes are not selling in a day or two, or even in a week. We're seeing that on average they're selling between 78 to 90 days in the last 12 months, but this is normal!

This still constitutes a Seller's Market. Now, it is important to make sure you have the right agent to advise you as to the proper listing price because one thing that we're seeing is a lot of price reductions, which at the end of the day I truly believe ends up hurting you, so it's imperative that you market your home correctly and that you price it correctly right off the bat. If you're thinking about selling a home, please reach out to me for a no commitment consultation. I'm happy to sit down with you and answer any questions and of course explain all of this a little bit further. And just for reaching out and meeting with me, I will provide you with a $50 thank you dinner gift card.

I'm Isabel Guzman, Broker Associate and Realtor® with eXp Realty. Be sure to look out for all

of my videos on YouTube and social media.