What a Crazy Year for Real Estate in 2021

It’s a new year and you know what that means. It’s time to review the 2021 year-end statistics. Interest rates shot up 16% just after the new year. New listings are slowly but surely coming online, and the data from last year is pretty wild. Let’s get into it. Hi everybody, Dan Korman here, broker/owner of Alpenglow Properties, a local real estate brokerage located in Durango, Colorado. It’s January 15th, 2022, and boy do we have a jam-packed real estate update for you. The calendar year of 2021 has come to an end and it was one for the record books. For example, La Plata County’s average monthly sales price topped one million for the first time in history this last November. And that was based on an 87 unit sample size. That’s no tiny size for it by any means. Though, 10 sold for over two million and one home sold for 8.7 near Purgatory. Interest rates for 30-year fixed-rate mortgages dipped all the way below 2.7% last year. And if you bought down the rate at that time, you might’ve even secured an interest rate below 2%. That’s absolutely bananas. When I bought my first home in 2004, I secured financing with what is now known as a NINJA loan, a product long forgotten. And back then, rates were at historic lows in the mid sixes. So with mortgage rates bumping up over 3.5% in the first weeks of this year, it’s anyone’s guess where rates will land in 2022. But they’re still very good, and we’ll be watching them closely, as for every point the rate goes up, buyers stand to lose about 10% of their purchasing power, which can have direct effects on the real estate market. The headlines of 2021 almost all indicated that the housing supply both here and across the nation was at all time low, which is very true. Interestingly, new listings added to La Plata County housing stock were only down 13% for the year, and still a solid 4/5 of the new listings that came onto the market in 2019. While a 20% decrease from the pre-pandemic supply isn’t all that shocking, the main storyline was driven by the snapshot of active listing inventory at any given time throughout the year. Some people confuse new listings with inventory, as both measure the supply side of the market, but they actually capture different things. This can be better described with the bathtub metaphor. New listings are the flow of water entering the tub, with closed sales representing the flow of water draining out of the tub. Thus the water level or active listing inventory is rising or falling depending upon how much water is entering and leaving that tub. In this market, the drain has been wider than the spout, causing our bathtub to get shallow and really quite cold. But with demand to live in wonderful places such as Durango at all time highs, new listings are getting snapped up quickly, and it happened all year last year, causing the county single family active listings to be down 48% at the end of 2021, with Durango’s in-town tub drained all the way down to 73% below the inventory of 2020. This has caused a pretty big spike in pricing when coupled with the low interest rates. The average sales price for a home in La Plata County landed just over $783,000 for 2021. That’s a 27% increase year over year. This was in conjunction with a milder yet still incredible median price point of 627,000, showing a 22% increase over the median sold price of a home in 2020. The median price is a more accurate measure for the market, since it shows that half of the homes sold above that 627 price point and half sold below. On the bright side, that means that the average property owner in LPC gained somewhere between 150 and $250,000 in net worth just by owning a home over the last two years. But while this is good news to homeowners, it’s a pain point for buyers that will only be relieved by more inventory coming onto the market this year. Unfortunately, that’s all the time we have for this video. But I’m happy to share interesting sales stats for condos and townhomes, the markets of Bayfield, Mancos, Ignacio with you because they’re interesting too. So if you’d like to dive into specific data relating to your property, or just discuss your real estate goals for 2022 and beyond, please feel free to contact me anytime at Dan@AlpenglowProperties.com, or ping us with a DM on any of our social handles @DurangoBrokers. Thank you for watching the Durango Real Estate Update. If you like our content, please click that thumbs up button and subscribe below to be notified when we drop new videos. Try to fix it even if you didn’t break it, and we’ll see you next time.

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