In this video, Scott Talley, Broker | Owner of 5Market Realty, discusses the increasing amount of homes for sale in the Athens, GA area.
Hey there, if you follow us here on our website or our YouTube channel, you know my name is Scott Talley. I’m the owner broker here at 5Market Realty where we do monthly market updates for our clients that follow us, for people that are in the market, and really just to help you stay informed on the Athens area real estate market – things that are going on, trends, home sales, the numbers, and really anything around the Athens area. So if you have interest in Athens area real estate, currently thinking about moving to Athens, or need to stay informed about the market, be sure to click subscribe. Otherwise, we’re going to go ahead and get started here today. It’s after July 4th, we’re doing this a little later than usual. That’s just because of the holiday weekend, and there’s some things to talk about.
Number one, the slow and steady increase of inventory and the changes in the market. So let’s go ahead and get started. I don’t want this one to be too long or too long-winded if I can help it, but if you follow us, you know we track four main things over three years: new listings, days on market, the average home sale price, and the total amount of home sales. We do this in one part, combining Clark and Oconee County, kind of making that one market. And now we do some other things where we might break it apart and look at other historic trends to see what it is we can glean or gain insights from what changes might be coming.
2024 Year-To-Date Through June 30
So, those were the past two years. We’ll come here and pull up what we saw; this is year-to-date through June 30th. Now, total new listings, as I mentioned the last one, we’re a little better than last year, but not great. So, we’re 12% up on new listings, much more in line with 2022, which was not an outstanding year in real estate. Days on market is up over last year, almost 2 .5%, but that’s still well much higher 42 than 26 from 2022, which I’m looking at right here. Now, I do want to note 42 is the average; there are a lot of properties that their days on market is actually much more than 50 days. What’s happening is we have some that are going over 60, and then we’ve got those unique properties that go fast, helping this average come down. I would say three-fourths of the property should expect over 50 days.
Now, the average sold price ticked up a little bit, at 5%. We’re at 485, combining Clark and Oconee County. Keep in mind that when you look at Oconee alone, it’s going to be more like 600+. Now, total home sales. This is, again, where we’re still behind 2022, which is over 105,884 year-to-date right now, 788 and 2023. So what is it like I said before, it’s better than last year, but it’s just not great. So we’re up about 11%.
Now, let’s look at the month of June and just look at that exactly. Total new listings, kind of wanted to see some more; we got 176, relative to 193 last year in June. We must have seen an influx of inventory, so we were 8% behind last year. Days on market is relatively flat, 33 to 34 days, compared to 19 days on market in 2022. And then this average sale price is up significantly. And one of the things that’s happening, overall appreciation has not jumped that high, at at 12%. We’ve had some high dollar properties in Clark and Oconee County that have not been on the market for a while, and I think they’ve driven that to what would probably be more like a 5-6% to show a 12% what happened in the month of June.
Total Homes Sold
Now, right here, total home sold. This is kind of a big thing to look at. We had 150 homes sold in June, that’s nowhere near what we had in May last month. I’m going to call that zero when compared to the same time last year. I’ll make one more note, 2023, if I go to pull this today, it’s showing roughly about 40 more home sales than it should because I’ve tracked the numbers for, I don’t know, four years now, and report from last July showed there were 151, but if I run the numbers, you know, a year later, there seems to be some ghost in the machine. So I’m going to stick with my numbers from July 5th or 6th of last year, and it’s of course nowhere near as good as 2022. Let’s go to the next slide here.
Monthly inventory of homes. You can see the red arrow, I’ve been tracking this. This is the homes that are active on the market, not active contingent, that are not under contracted on the market for Clark and Oconee County. Now, you saw I just pulled up the graphic there that says 100 more than the last year, so 343 homes is not some staggering number we’ve never seen before, but it’s 100 more than a year ago, and that’s a good thing for buyers. There are changes in our market, we’re starting to see inventory slowly build because homes are not being absorbed. Frankly, interest rates, inflation, buyer demand is down. People that don’t have to buy a house are not in the market.
Monthly Total Sales
Now, monthly total sales, Clark and Oconee County. I track this just to kind of make sure we see the trends, and what I want to point out, as been shown many times, we’d love to be above 200, and look where we almost got in May. I remember if you called the last one, we were calling for that to be probably the peak of the year in buyer activity and peak of sales. Well, you can see there it is, 192, and that’s right where it looks like it’s going to be, because we came down to 150. Now, it’s July 9th as I’m doing this on the Tuesday evening, that’s nine days since June 30th for a real estate agent to put a sale into the MLS. So I don’t think we’re going to see that number of 150 change drastically.
On to the next slide, monthly new listings again. We talked about this before, but what I want to pull up for you here are these dates. Why do we have more inventory now when we’re not getting a ton of new listings? Well, if you can see in January of 2023, there’s barely anything at 133, and then we stayed flat, dropped way off. January 2024, we actually started more like 200 listings, and then it stayed up there, and because the buyer demand came down, not everything’s getting taken off the market. So since we have less sales, a little bit more listings, that inventory is starting to build a little bit, and that’s the story of the market and what you need to be paying attention to, whether you’re not selling your house, looking to buy a house, this is something to watch over the coming times.
Now, we track this monthly absorption rate as well. This is basically how much inventory is on the market based on the amount of home sales. So you see those numbers below, and we want to be at a four to six as a balanced buyer and seller market. Well, here we are, based on the home sales and the inventory, we are at 2.28. Now, that looks like a low number, it’s well below four months, but here’s another thing I want to show you. Look at a year ago, one but less than one and a half months inventory, 1.48. Now we’re at 2.28, that’s a significant change, and that is the trend you need to be paying attention to. But what’s going to happen now? We’re almost going to be in August where homes are going to come off the market, they’re probably unlikely to get absorbed a lot by buyers. We typically don’t see that. Probably, you know, may see an interest rate cut, but we can’t predict that. So let’s watch this inventory because that’s going to tell us what we need to know about the market.
Oconee Vs. Clark County
Now, I’m going to slide my head here in the middle a little bit, which I don’t always do, maybe I’ll go over here. Yeah, we’ll do that. So what this is is from InfoSparks, which is in our MLS. The darker burgundy line is Clark County, the green line is Oconee. These are not combined, they’re separated, and these are the active homes for sale, basically going back for 2019. If we start here, we’ll go ahead and pull up some of these numbers here for you: 325, that’s just Clark County. If you can look here in 2019, 325 homes for sale, that is not combining Oconee County. So it would have been more like 200 plus. 325 would have been over 500 homes for sale, pre-2020, pre much more normal real estate market. Here we are today at 275, that’s Clark County. 275 and 325, I’m not great at math, that’s 50 homes. That’s not a huge difference. You can see by this graph, most of our inventory is actually in Clark County. So Oconee does have a different market, still much lower inventory relative to history, but we’re not far off from 2019 in inventory, while that’s not any record. Market correction number, watch this slow drip of inventory. If you’re a home seller, you need to be watching your price.
So here we are. I’ll slide my head to cover my own. This is our group here at F Market Realty, a group of realtors that can help you in the Athens area and places around it. Info at 5mrealty. One of the things I would like to say is this small group, which we are, boutique, smaller firm by design, they had over 11, about 12, 13% of the market share in the Athens MLS for a couple of counties last month. Very proud of that, didn’t even realize it until I started going through the numbers and said, well, there were only 150 sales in these two counties. How many of them did we have? So I’ve mentioned that before, info 5mrealty. Be sure to click subscribe. It’s hot out there. It’s July, which means August is around the corner, and college football, which we love here in Athens. Have a great one. Thanks for staying for me with eight and a half minutes.