February 02, 2010

Marshfield Real Estate

I took a statistics class in college and I remember it wasn’t easy. But still, as I read Kristen Morse’s last post about real estate in Norwell, I felt inspired to give it a go. I pulled some data from the last quarter of 2008 so I could compare it to the last quarter of 2009 to see where we’re at now compared to the same time last year.

I should preface these figures by saying my sample includes homes listed and sold by brokers in our town. Because I pulled my data from the MLS, it does NOT include private sales like “For Sale By Owner” transactions (which, by the way, averaged a sales price of $153,000 in 2008 versus an average sales price of $211,000 for homes sold by Realtors - according to the Board of Realtors).

I also tried to eliminate distortion by removing the two most extreme values in every sample. For example, a 10 acre riverfront estate sold for 2.3 million in November of 2009 and that would have really skewed my results for 2009, so as a rule I removed the two most expensive as well as the two least expensive sales from every time period.

With that said, when I finally ran the numbers I got some pretty good news - prices only fell by about 1.3% last year! Much better than 2008 when prices were falling by 1% every month. Here is the data:

Average single-family home sold in Marshfield
from October – December 2008: $396,500
from October – December 2009: $391,500

Number of single-family homes sold in Marshfield
from October – December 2008: 39
from October – December 2009: 69

So I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief here. People are finally buying again, and after months and months of watching our home values drop and drop, I think we’re finally starting to level off.

I wish you all a prosperous year of successful home transactions! And remember, for more information on the real estate market here South of Boston visit my website at www.thehousekimfoundme.com or email me at kjardim@jackconway.com.

Posted by:Kim Herget-Jardim