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📊📈 Dive into the latest trends and insights from the local real estate market in Summit & Wasatch Counties. 🏞️🏠 Whether you’re a homeowner, potential buyer, or just love keeping up with market trends, these stats are a must-read.
January 2024 – After a two-plus yearlong real estate roller coaster, Park City Realtors are experiencing a market that many characterize as “closer to normal” than we have seen in recent quarters. Instead of focusing on post-Covid recovery, agents are more inclined to talk about a stable market with continuing moderate price appreciation and growing inventory.
The current market is probably being affected by higher interest rates and somewhat reduced inventory more than by any Covid hangover.
The inventory of available homes is approaching a healthy level having peaked in late summer at nearly 1,800 properties for sale. In the last full year before the Covid-crash, PCMLS averaged 2,100 listings each month. Sales prices have stabilized with single-family homes within Park City limits selling for slightly less than they did a year earlier and median prices in the Snyderville Basin are up just single digits year over year.
With inventories returning to a more normal level, and competition for available properties still running strong, market times and absorption rates (the length of time it would take to sell all current inventory based on the current rate of sales) are also remained steady.
Sales totals for single-family homes in Summit and Wasatch counties for all of 2023 were down just 2% from 2022. Prices remained steady to up slightly. The median home sale price in the PCMLS primary market area increased just 3% for the year ending 12/31/23 vs. the same period ending 12/31/22. The short term measure of quarterly median price increases presages to some the direction consumers might see for both sales prices and volume in the year ahead. But Park City is a highly seasonal market and many others point out that comparing one quarter to the next is not a valid predictor of a future trend.
This decrease in local market price volatility reflects trends seen elsewhere in the country, as business returns to a more seasonal pattern and extremes become scarcer. Mark Fleming, chief economist at First American Financial Corporation, predicts a “flat stretch” ahead for the housing market. “If the 2020-2021 housing market was too hot, then the 2023 market was probably too cold, but 2024 won’t yet be just right,” Fleming said in his 2024 forecast.
- Inventory has improved greatly over the past two years. As of January 1, 2022, greater Park City posted 280 active residential listings. As of January 1, 2024, that number was 840 or a 200% increase. However, comparing this year to the pre-covid years (2012 – 2019) inventory remains lower by 25%.
- The wild price swings that were prevalent the past couple of years have moderated. Average prices of single-family homes in Park City proper grew only 1% over last year. The median sale price for a single-family home in the city actually declined 5% to $3.7 million. 0020
In Summit and Wasatch Counties, the rate of sales (number of units sold) dropped 11% for single-family homes and 25% for condominiums from the full year prior. Sales declines across the region were attributed to fewer listings than demand could handle.
Park City is very much a community of neighborhoods. Prices and availability vary widely from one neighborhood to the next.
For single-family homes, four of the five major areas that make up the greater Park City market showed drops in units sold from 2022 to 2023. The exception was in the Snyderville Basin, where unit sales increased 4%. Within the central neighborhoods, Jeremy Ranch was the market leader in sales units, closing 34 sales, 42% more than last year.
Condo sales across the primary market range followed a pattern similar to single-family homes. Year-over-year sales units increased in Heber Valley and around the Jordanelle by 33% and 13% respectively. Closer in, condo unit sales in Park City and Snyderville dwindled, down 19% and 48% respectively.
Prices, however, were mixed across these two areas. Within the Park City limits, the median sale price rose 8% to $1.6 million. In the Snyderville Basin, the median sale price dipped just under $1 million, down 8%.
Comparing the 12 months ending December 31, 2023, to the same period ending in 2022:
- Residential inventory (single-family and condo) year-to-date is showing signs of recovery after a lengthy period of declines. At the end of December 2022, there were just 738 residential listings for sale in the entire PCMLS coverage area. On December 31, 2023, that number had grown to 880, almost 20% more.
- The market picked up some momentum heading into the last half of 2023. In the seven months from June thru December, PCMLS members signed 1,260 residential purchase contracts 20% more than the previous year (1,054).
- With New Listings running slightly higher than Pending contracts, inventory is being replaced faster than it is selling. For the year ending 12/31/23, 2,915 listings were added to the system. For the same period only 2,031 were put under contract. That’s 884 more listings added than contracts written, which hasn’t been seen in quite some time.
