The Cyclical Nature of the Greenwich Real Estate Market
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For the past couple months on Facebook and Twitter, I have been talking about the relative levels of Greenwich’s real estate inventory between this year, 2010 and last. Since December 2009, our current year’s level of inventory of homes has held lower than the last. This discrepancy has sparked more confidence (from me) in the Greenwich market turning. Now, in addition, we are starting to see a drop in inventory on an actual basis. Although, I consistently tell people to throw out any assumptions they may be able to draw from the past 20 or so years because those rules and trends do not seem to apply in today’s incomprehensible market, I believe this decrease in inventory is due to the cyclical nature of the market.
August and September are funny months for real estate because summer ends and school starts. Not many families want to be looking for real estate at this time. Most families are either in contract or have bought their house so their kids are ready for school (see the sales graph). Sellers know this, so they try to list their house before this lack of interest in moving comes up. I believe that this is what we are seeing. I’d love to state that we are going to have a run up in prices because of this tick down in inventory, but I believe that this is, in fact, cyclical.
