Can you believe 2012 is coming to a close already? We’re almost half-way through December, and soon we’ll be ringing in the new year! This year has been nice for the local real estate market. Perfect? Excellent? The Best? No. But nice, yes. Residential contracts have been strong throughout the year, which in turn produces a rise in sales. We’ve seen a slight reduction in inventory over the past year, too, which definitely helps sellers out as there are not as many homes for buyers to choose from. Note: It is still very much a buyer’s market! Instead of reminiscing about 2012, though, lets take a look at some solid stats for the year, and more specifically November.

Sales have jumped 28.4% this month compared to last, and 13.8% this year compared to last. As we said earlier, a rise in sales, and not as many new listings hitting the market means inventory is down. This is good for sellers, and a slight decrease in sales prices for the year isn’t completely terrible. (A dip of 0.5% is much better than it could be!) Home values continue to stay just over about $100 per square foot at $100.87 year-to-date.

Above is a quick look at how sales have trended over the past 12 months. Except for dips in January and September (both to be expected, in reality), we’ve seen increases in sales continuously throughout the year. This is all thanks to the steady rises in contracts…

Compared to last year, we’ve seen an increase in residential contracts of 6.4%. Because of the holiday season setting in, a drop in contracts from last month occurred, by 35.6%. This is to be expected, and will likely affect January/February sales numbers, so we’ll watch for that in the coming months. The good news is that of the homes that have gone under contract this year, they sat on the market for a shorter period of time.

Although contracts were lower this November than last, they are still higher than contracts in 2009 and 2010. Based on past trends, we can expect December contracts to be lower than November, but only time will tell.

Typically in the chart above, we like to see the contracts line higher than the sales bars because that means we’ll see more sales to come in the future. However, the holiday season is upon us, so the Harrisonburg real estate market (and probably almost every other market in the country) will see a bit of a slow-down.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen average sales prices remain fairly steady, but November dropped off a bit compared to months past. Sales, however, rose over the past few months.

The holiday season is a wonderful time to reflect on the past year, and we have been very blessed by our faithful clients, friends, families, followers, subscribers, and fans. THANK YOU for your dedication to our team, and we look forward to seeing how 2012 finishes up, and to what 2013 will bring. We could not do our job without you all, and we are grateful.

Stay tuned for more Market Trends, right here on Harrisonblog…