Clark County’s housing market saw mixed results in sales for October, according to real estate data released on Friday, with 680 sales reported but only 843 new listings compared to 951 reported the month before.
The 680 closed sales represent a slight jump over the number of sales reported in September, according to the Regional Multiple Listing Service’s monthly Market Action report, but it’s also a decline from October 2017. Pending sales also declined year-over-year.
Average and median home sale prices jumped upward in October, both in comparison to October 2017 and September 2018. Average sale prices reached $397,600, bringing the year-to-date average up to $393,200, an increase of 8.6 percent over the year-to-date average from October 2017.
“The thing that jumps out to me the most is if you look at the three-year trend, October inventory tends to stay somewhat stagnant,” said Terry Wollam, managing broker for ReMax Equity Group in Vancouver. “(In this case) it dropped a little bit more than the year prior, so that was positive to see.”
Overall, Wollam said the market seemed to be following a usual annual pattern in which things tend to cool off in the fall months, although he said there was an additional factor that may have slowed things down in October: the midterm elections.
Regardless of the political landscape or a potential buyer’s political affiliations, an upcoming election can generate a feeling of uncertainty, Wollam said, resulting in a fairly consistent pattern of housing market slowdowns in the months leading up to elections.
“Not knowing what’s going to happen tends to cause a bit of paralysis in buyers’ decision-making,” he said. “We usually see as we get closer to an election, people will tend to wait until the election is over.”
The trend is usually more visible in presidential election years, Wollam said, but he noted that this year’s midterms saw unusually high turnout, rivaling that of a presidential election. Now that the election is over, Wollam said he would expect to see a slight bump in housing market activity to balance out October — and so far that’s been the case, he added.
“We have seen a bit of a bump,” he said. “Not dramatic, but definitely an increase in activity — normally you wouldn’t see that. November’s numbers will be a little bit better than they would’ve been otherwise.”
Looking toward the rest of the year, Wollam said he expects the market to remain slower due to usual winter season factors like the weather and the holidays, but with a little bit of a bump at the tail end of the year as a few buyers push to close sales before the new year for tax reasons. The market will likely begin heating up again in the first few months of 2019, he added.
