One Market Going Up, One Going Down

It is interesting to see the Big Bear Real Estate Market dynamics for the two price ranges I have split the market into. The $0-$800,000 market and the $800,000 + market. For those of you that have been following me for the last few years you may remember the $800,000+ market was almost dead a few years ago. There were months that there were no sales in several months. This brought tremendous pressure for the sellers in this price range to drop their prices. But instead of dropping their prices most owners chose to hang onto their cabins and wait. Then they were rewarded by a good market for sales. While the prices didn’t go up that much at least they could sell their cabins when priced at market value. They saw a little price increase but the amount of sales which changed from no sales in some months to an average of over 20 sales every month was a real game changer for that price range. If you look at the first graph of sales vs. listings you will see that in Jan. of 2021 there was 64 listings with 10 sales or 16% of the listing sold and in Feb. of 2021 there were 72 listings with 13 sales or 18% of the listings sold. But look what happen in 2022. In Jan there were 64 listings with 22 sales or 34% of listings sold and in Feb. there were 81 listings with 17 sales or 21% of listings sold. So percentage of sales actually increased in 2022 by 18% in Jan. and 3% in Feb.. This is really not expected. Let me show you why.

When we look at the dominate market, the 0-$800,000 market, it has always out paced the $800,000+ market. But not right now! Of course the amount of sales are larger but let’s take a look at the percentage of sales to listing. The second graph shows us the 0-$800,000 market listings vs sales. As you can see in Jan. of 2021 there were 200 listings and 123 sales, or 62% of listings sold. In Feb there were 220 listings with 92 sales, or 42% of listings sold. Then in 2020 Jan had 154 listings with 69 sales, or 45% of listings sold. In Feb we had 194 listings with 59 sales, or 30% of listings sold. This gives us a loss of 17% in Jan. and 12% in Feb. So what does all this mean?

The two Real Estates Markets up here have always acted independently of each other. But this was a surprise. Like always we will have to get a few more months data to see the kind of changes that the market will bring. I don’t expect the $800,000+ market to continue to get stronger through out the year. But it could have a good summer again. As far as the 0-$800,000 market I don’t expect it to continue to go down like it has the last few months. But I do expect it to slow down and these number may be the beginning of that slow down. But the summer is always the best time to sell in Big Bear and I expect this summer to be a good summer for the 0-$800,000 market as well as the $800,000+ market. What might be interesting this summer is that there will probably be lower sales in the 0-$800,000 market which will put pressure on sellers to drop their price. Will they do that and if so how much.