Q2 Market Report
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, you could expect the Park City real estate market to ebb and flow from one quarter to the next. The gains of a stellar winter or summer would often plateau in the shoulder season of the second and fourth quarters of a given year. There's been a kind of seasonal check and balance and with that, the market's rise over the past decade has been relatively smooth and steady. No sudden changes.
Until the summer of 2020. Since then, each quarter has substantially outperformed the same quarter from the year before, often setting new quarterly records. It's left many buyers, sellers, and even real estate agents scratching their heads as they navigate a market for which there is no precedent.
Is the the market back to normal yet?
Last winter, when the vaccine rollout was imminent, I started to hear people (mostly agents) theorize that the market would return to normal during the spring and early summer of the second quarter. They conjectured that the vaccine would make people would sober up to the market, especially transplants who moved to Park City on a whim; and as they got called back into their offices out-of-state or their kids missed their hometowns, those who bought properties impulsively over the last year would put them up for sale en masse.
That would bring buyers more listings to choose from, cool demand, and soften prices so that the market was more balanced i.e. "normal."
Well, that hasn't happened. By the end of April, the vaccine was widely available to all adults living in Utah and yet the quarter finished with these kind of statistics in the Wasatch Back (a.k.a. the greater Park City real estate market):
- 23% more properties sold in Q2 over Q1 2021
- Average transaction price is up 54% over Q2 2020
- Months supply of inventory is holding around 2 months +/-.
The story behind the numbers
You have probably heard someone say that there's "just nothing for sale." In reality, there has been a surge in available inventory over the past year, evidenced by the increasing number of properties sold. It's just that these properties are getting purchased quickly and often at record prices in a short period of time. That's happening across the state of Utah, which has been among the top 2 or 3 fastest growing in the country for at least the past 8 years and there just are no signs that the conditions are going to change market-wide.
So is this the new normal?
That term has become played-out, but it's time to accept that the real estate market in Park City was not just going through a phase this past year. In a future post, I'll share what changes I think are here to stay and what conditions I think will reemerge as we progress further away from the pandemic.
