Numbers don't Lie...Part I

I was browsing Trulia today and came across some interesting numbers. In their Brookline Real Estate Guide they show snapshot graphs of the average sale price, median sale price, average price per square foot, average listing price, and the number of sales. These numbers are broken down into number of bedrooms as well as the whole market. Now, the data is culled from "assessor and title deed data and Trulia search traffic." The one wild-card in this are the numbers that come from Trulia search traffic, because we do not know how representative of the market they are. Let's just assume for discussion purposes though that the numbers are pretty close to being on target. What do we see?

The average sales price for 1 bedroom condos has gone up 11.2% in the second quarter of the year. Now, this is the heart of the season, but a gain of over 10% is noteworthy considering the media's perspective so far this year. For 2 bedrooms there was also a gain, although this one was just shy of 2%. Three bedroom condos lost 6% but I would actually expect to see a gain in the 3rd quarter numbers, as most families with kids like to close on their condos between July and September. 4 bedroom homes, which in Brookline puts you in the $1,000,000+ ball park, we are down only 0.7% since the first quarter. The interesting stat to look at for the 4 bedroom homes is the change from one year ago. In the 2nd quarter of 2006 a 4 bedroom home sold for an average of $880,447, today it's $1,128,918. That is SIGNIFICANT positive growth.

Check back tomorrow for more...