It's back because somebody cared...

I recently reinstated a feature on my real estate web sites that I had dropped about a month ago. That feature was the tracking of the home sales in the markets that I cover - the townships (and included Villages or Cities) of Milford, Highland, Commerce, White Lake, Lyon and West Bloomfield in Oakland County;  along with Green Oak, Brighton and Hartland in Livingston County. I had been reporting the weekly sales in most of those locations for 6-7 years. The reported data format changed a bot over that time, but the basic sales data was always there.

Now I will admit that this is a somewhat arbitrary report of sales data. I did not report sales under $20,000. Those sale are mainly tear-down or made for he land value alone. I also only reported single family homes; so, condos were not included in the data. During the recent "Great Recession" I added a field to indicate whether the sale was a distressed sale, which was defined as a foreclosure or short sale. I also reported the SEV (State Equalized Value) of the home at the time of the sale and calculated the ratio of SEV to Sales Price.

The SEV is a contrived number in Michigan which is supposed to equate to 1/2 of the assessed market value. The idea was that if you doubled the SEV you would have the market value, at least as the assessor saw it. The fact was that it was never possible to calculate a market value by taking a straight 2.0 times the SEV. At the depth of the recession sale prices were running about 1.4 times the SEV and now that the recovery has sky-rocketed prices the sales prices are running about 2.4 times SEV or better.

Both the distressed sale indicator and the SEV and the calculated SEV as a factor of sales price number became largely irrelevant as we exited the recession, so I have stopped reporting them in the current report. I have added instead, fields that show the number of bedrooms and baths of the sold houses. I hope that these fields will make the data more meaningful for many.

So, if you are interested in what's happening in my little patch in the real estate world, go to any of my three real estate web site - www.movetomilford.com, www.huronvalleyrealtor.com or www.themilfordteam.com and look for the link that will take you to what has sold recently in the area. The reason that I reinstated this feature is that several of my followers emailed mine to tell me that they missed it. It's always helpful to get that kind of feedback, so that I can see what is important to visitors to the sites.