Hi, this is Mark Slade with Keller Williams and one of the Top Agents in Soma.
It’s always nice to be able to report positive news, so here goes: 2022 was a great year in real estate, so you can forget about all those things that you hear nationally because the National Market is quite a bit different. Why is this the case? Well, there is a lot of new home construction in areas where there is a good amount of land available to build. Here, in South Orange, as you are likely to know, there is only an eyedropper’s worth of available land where a new home could be built. As a result, we don’t have bloated inventories to sell and that is good as Supply and Demand are two key variables in housing market performance. We are also a Bedroom Community of NYC, so we have additional reasons to have a much stronger real estate market as compared to the nation as a total.
Let’s look at the statistics for 2022. For starters, the average list price rose to $810,591, which is a 6% increase over the previous year’s $762,000. More importantly, the average sales price rose to just about $905,000, which is an almost an 11.6% increase over the year before. It’s great to see that we now have a “9” in front of the average sale price. This performance represents about a 4 times better performance considering that the average lifetime growth in prices for Real Estate is between 3% and 4%.
With consistent buyer demand for homes in our area, it’s clear that the limited inventory (supply) as we have seen throughout the general area, has produced a dramatic drop the number of units–only 162 homes were sold in South Orange in 2022 and that represents a drop of 43 percent over prior year (2021). In comparison sister-town Maplewood unit sales were down 34 percent, with 253 homes sold there.
Listed by The Slade Team for $500,000 and sold for $625,000
As one could imagine, the lack of inventory produced higher sale prices also led to a decrease in the number of Days on Market, polling at 17.8 days. That’s good news for sellers as it means homes are selling that much more quickly so there is less disruption to sellers’ lives when they are selling their properties.
The highest list price in 2022 was $1.8 million and that property sold at its asking price of $1.8 million. While you might have assumed this was the highest sale price in SOMA, that title goes to Maplewood in 2022 where the highest sale price registered was $2,250,000.
Believe it or not, there was a property in South Orange that amazingly sold for 158% of its asking price or $468,000 over its asking price. That was just a phenomenal result, however, conversely, we did have a property that sold for 28 under asking or 72 percent of asking price.
The number of homes that sold for over a million totaled 56 in 2022, representing a drop of 10 from 2021’s 66 properties sold for over $1,000,000. Not allowing the stats to play with our heads, because there was such a dramatic drop off in the number of available properties for sale, the results in 2022 were actually an improvement when you look at the percentage of million dollar homes relative to the total. Million-dollar homes represented 35 percent of the marketplace in 2022 while this same ratio was 22% in 2021.
Listed by The Slade Team for $650,000 and sold for $802,500
I also like to track performance in three buckets: Homes that sold for Over Asking, Homes that Sold at Asking and Homes that Sold for less than asking. Of the 162 homes sold in 2022, 78% sold for over asking, another 9% sold for asking, meaning that 87% of the properties sold for asking and above in 2022. Of course that leaves 13% for properties that sold under asking–that’s the lowest recorded as you can imagine in the past four years.
So now you know that it was another really great year for real estate in South Orange and while the yields aren’t necessarily as high as they were at the beginning of last year we still expect good things for the first half of 2023. If you know of anyone looking for a listing agent and want some advice about how to increase the sale price of your property, we have a book we can give you uh how to sell your home for more money. We also want you to know that our team sold our listings at 24% over asking which is more than twice the township average in 2022. If you have any questions feel free to call or text me at 917-797-5059 and have a great day.
