Market Report for real estate in the Milford area

There are lots of articles about the national real estate market and the occasional article about the Michigan market; but how are we doing locally? Here’s my attempt to give you a snapshot of our local market. I invite you to visit my web site www.movetomilford.com if you want to see all of the statistics that I have been collecting all year long. I’ll use a combination of charts from Altos Research and my own local market data from the Multi-List Service, which I update and report weekly. It's unfortunate that the Blogger editor is so poor that I can't get the graphics of the Y-T-D stats to appear correctly, but that's what I'm left with.

The Milford market (Township and Village) –

 

 

Year-to-date Stats thru November 11 –

  

Key – SEV = State Equalized Value (what the assessors thought they were worth), DOM = Days on Market, the last two are what the sellers ask and got per square foot for the homes

 

The Commerce Township market –

 

Year-to-Date Stats –

 

 

The Highland Township market –

Year-to-Date Stats

 

 

The White Lake Township market –

 

 

Year-to-Date Stats

 

Great stats and charts, but what does this all mean?

 

You can see just in four markets that are right next to each other how volatile and variable the real estate market is right now. The Milford market is generally up in home sales values; however the chart also points to both inventory and average sale values falling. That is because so much of the middle of the normal market is still frozen and what is selling lately has been mainly on the lower end. That inventory has fallen too, so right now it’s just hard to find a good house in Milford.

 

The Commerce market, which includes data from Walled Lake and Wolverine Lake, has sort of flat-lined out at the current level. At least that level was generally higher than the market has been, but the Commerce market is still dominated by lower end sales and enough foreclosures and short sales to keep values under $100/Sq Ft for the year. The Commerce market actually broke through the $100/Sq Ft barrier in October and you can see that if you go look at the archive of monthly stats that I keep at the www.movetomilford.com web site.

 

Highland Township’s market looks to be following a traditional supply vs. demand curve, with average sale values going up as the inventory comes down. The Highland market has actually been over $100/Sq Ft for three months now, but it was so depressed for a long while that it will take a bit before that is reflected in the Y-T-D stats. You can still get a fairly good deal on homes in Highland.

 

The White Lake market trails the rest and has yet to react to the falling inventory by showing higher average sale values. White Lake is another market that has been greatly impacted by foreclosures and short sales. The market is still about 40% distressed sales and you can still finds homes for under $90/SqFt. You will also find more lower-priced homes in White Lake than in the other three.