2024 Wrap Up

Wondering how we ended the year last year in the Summit County Real Estate Market?  Candice provides a brief summary of 2024.

This episode shares some highlights about how 2023 was pretty tough, and 2024 data shows it was better than anticipated (and better than it felt).  We explore some intricacies in the different price categories that may lead to median prices continuing to rise.

We also talk about predictions for 2025.

#summitcountycolorado #summitcorealestate #realestatetrends

Transcript

Welcome to Mountain Real Estate, where we bring you the latest insights on real estate from Denver to Summit County, Colorado. I'm your host, Candice De, a realtor, investor, engineer, mom, and Colorado native. Welcome to Mountain Real Estate. Today we're going to talk about a wrap-up from December and what we saw both in the month and in 2024 in general. So we're going to talk about how we ended the real estate market in 2024. We're going to talk about some stats and then we're also going to talk about where we see some of the best opportunities as we look forward into 2025. 

So we'll start with interest rates. It's not a new topic, but in general rates averaged arranged across the US between a little over 6% to a little over 7%. So 6.08 was our low and 7.17 was the high on average. The end of December, we landed in the high sixes, which isn't terrible, but also isn't as what we were mostly hoping for. A lot of people were hoping for rates to continue dropping. But I think we are all adjusting to this new norm. this higher interest rate market than we had for several years. So the good news is we're getting used to it. 

All right. Let's jump into home prices. So in Summit County, our medium home prices went up in 2024. Despite the feel of the market softening, prices are still holding, holding strong. And I'll talk a little bit about why I think that's happening. So as we look at the median home prices. For a single family home in Summit County, it's over $2 million. We're up to 2.1 million, which is an increase of 16% compared to last year's median home price for a single family home, which was 1.8 last year. So 2023 was a soft year. So in 2022, the median home price was 1.835. So we actually saw it higher in 2022 than we saw in 2023, but then it's gone up even higher, over 2 million in 2024. I thought we would see a drop in condo and townhome prices, but that was not the case either. So the median price for condos and townhomes was $783,000 in Summit County, which was a little under 5% increase over 2023. Last year it was $750,000. So we saw prices go up a little bit higher in the single family and lower in the... townhouse and condo, but on average, we saw about a 7% appreciation this past year. 

Then we're gonna jump into the number of sold listings. So that was just our prices. Now we're gonna see how many transactions we had. So we broke this down by the different price ranges to instead of just single family and townhouse condo, to look at kind of what's happening within each price range in the market. So the under $500,000 properties is our smallest segment. It's about 9%. And those went down from 141 sales to 118 sales in 2024. So 141 in 2023 to 118 in 2024. Then we look at the 500 to a million dollar market, which is a lot of our townhouses and condos and some smaller single families. And that... had a similar trend as 2023. We had about 60 at the peak and we had about 500 total. Then as we jumped to the 1 million to $2 million properties, we maintained very similar to 2023. We had about 410 sales. Last year there was 428. And so that is about, this is our biggest. portion of the market. So that's about a third of our market. So 32%. The 500 to a million is the biggest portion of our market, which is just under 40%. So less than 500, the transactions went down. 500 to a million, we stayed about steady, close to 500 transactions in the year. 1 million to 2 million, we stayed steady, went down slightly from 428 to 410. And then the $2 million plus homes continue to increase. So we saw an increase from about 204 last year to 264 this year. So in total, we have very similar sales, a little under 1300 homes, but we saw a decrease in our low-end homes and an increase in our high-end homes. So that's kind of part of what's driving our median prices up even more. 

And then just to... re-emphasize the makeup of our market. The under 500 is about 9% of our market. The 500 to a million is about 39% of our market. One million to two million is about 32% of our market. And then over two million is about 20% of our market. So that one to two million is our highest makeup of our market. So we had about 1300 transactions. Our median home prices are going up. 

So how does that look on the ground? So next we're gonna talk about showings. I'm gonna start with just for comparison, the peak of COVID when things weren't on the market more than a week typically, and we saw over six showings per month on average. And really a lot of those six showings were within a couple of weeks or the first week when they were on the market. As we looked at 2024 in that, in general we had like two to three showings per property per month. which definitely feels a lot slower than COVID times. And I'll talk about the makeup in the different price ranges. So under 500 was our slowest. We had like one to two showings per listing per month. And the 500 to a million, we had two to three. A million to two million, we had two to four. So we had a little higher bump on those one to $2 million properties. And then the over 2 million had two to three showings per month. So it feels slow, but there's still... activity and showings happening. 

And then that translates into our days on market. So right now our average for the year is around two months on market. So obviously a different vibe than COVID when it was like, felt like a week. But during our peak seasons, we're under a month on average. But then that drives up in our winter season. Right now we're seeing really high days on market up to three to four months, depending on the price category. It really depends on the time of year and the type of property for the days on market, but in general, we're seeing an increase compared to what we have seen. 

A few other just random statistics, and then we'll jump into where we see the best opportunities. So about 40% of our transactions are cash in Summit County. So we don't feel that interest rate hit as much as some of our other markets in more urban areas where there's more. is a higher percentage of loans. About two thirds of ours have loans and then 40% are cash. And then in Summit County, we have kind of a diverse makeup of who's buying homes. We have about a third, a third, a third for locals, front range buyers and out of state buyers. So our local buyers in November were about 28%, front range was 37%, so a little bit higher and then our out of state buyers were 35%. And that shifts a little bit with seasonality based on tourism and visitation and who's coming up. So those are stats, our wrap up for 2024. 

Now I'm going to jump into where I see some opportunities in 2025. So we touched a little bit on those lower price condos, the sales are going down, the prices aren't appreciating as much. And we've seen not only interest rates affect those lower price condos, but also in Summit County, we had short term rental rules. that made them harder to become investment properties and harder for people to get that rental income. And then we also saw insurance and HOA impacts the affordability of these properties. So if you can't rent them and your prices are going up, it's really hit the demand for some of our lower end condos. So I do think that some of those factors will be mitigated as we look at short-term rentals or maybe medium-term rentals or long-term rentals. ways to make income on these will get a little bit easier as the prices drop a little bit. And I do think historically, these are a good price for some of those entry points into Summit County. I do think things will continue to appreciate and now is a good opportunity to get in at a lower price. The second place where I see opportunity is off-season purchases. And I'm going to do a separate podcast on seasonality in general. But According to the data, February, March, June, and October are months that show lower average prices. So if you back all of those out a month, January, February, May, and September are good times to be looking at properties in the mountains because in January and February, I think we have a lot of rentals and a lot of tourism. So people are either renting, the people that are on the market are pretty motivated. In May, things are just... a little bit slower, not really pretty up here because all the snow's melting, we call it mud season. And September, as the kids go back to school, a lot of families have kind of settled in and the buyer demand is a lot less. And so people that are still on the market during that time are maybe a little bit more motivated. So January, February, May, and September are those times where I think we're seeing opportunities. We're seeing that seasonality adjustment. So that's our wrap up for 2024. Thanks for listening in. Thanks for joining us today on Mountain Real Estate. I'm Candice De. If the mountains are calling you, reach out to me. See you next time.