I know a lot of folk’s attention is turning toward Christmas and the upcoming winter months, but believe it or not, there’s still quite a lot of activity going on in the Dubuque real estate market. We’re seeing a slight drop in inventory from our summertime peaks, but overall the numbers are very consistent in Dubuque. While holding between 525 to 550 listings per month in the MLS (multiple listing service) over the last six months, we’ve now fallen back to the 486 we have in Dubuque’s market today.
In terms of supply of home, our fairly good sales figures, when combined with the lower inventory numbers, have shrunk the available supply of homes in the market to a 6.5 month supply of homes. Dubuque hovered at or near the 7.0 month figure for the last six months, but now we are edging toward a more balanced (6.0 month) market. This is great news for sellers as there now seems to not be quite so much competition for buyers.
One thing to note in the chart below is that average sales prices have increased each and every year over the last five years. The economy has its ups and downs, but these latest averages show that Dubuque continues its steady climb in home prices. Nothing drastic here, but certainly not FALLING prices, as has been experienced by, oh, roughly 95% of the United States. Surely, Dubuque’s low unemployment rate of 4.8% is helping – nearly half of the national rate of unemployment…
The charts below show us where Dubuque has been on both a month-to-month basis as well as the year to date (through November 14th) sales totals. We had a pretty good October, selling 69 homes, which is still above our average number of sales per month over the last year. I noticed also that the year to date sales through today are only 25 shy of where we were last year, 697 vs. 722.
Given how slow the market was at the end of 2010, I faithfully predict that we’ll pull even and perhaps surpass 2010′s overall total number of sales. As shown on the first chart, we have 71 pending sales in the Dubuque area. If most of these contracts do follow though and close (not all sales contracts do!), I’m pretty confident we’ll get the job done.
