How the 2025 Sales Pace Compares... So Far

Manhattan Beach's real estate market isn't like most others – ever.

That's why this year, we're having a little trouble processing the industry news we come across that suggests a grim, sluggish real estate market in one place, another place, or nationally.

We are busier in our office today than almost ever, with only 2021-22 being at all comparable.

And yet, we see headlines, like this week's from the popular and long-running Calculated Risk blog:

It appears sales will be down year-over-year for the 3rd consecutive month, and sales-to-date in 2025 are trailing sales in 2024 – and 2024 was the lowest sales year since 1995!

We got an earful (and eyeful?) of similar news at a recent briefing at the California Association of Realtors meetings for the Board of Directors (of which Dave is a member).

CAR economist Jordan Levine told our group that the state is now seeing "decelerating" home sales on a year-over-year basis, exactly as Calculated Risk had reported nationally. 

A chart that Levine presented (we'll try to get it) showed a yawning gap of negative sales year-over year from 2022-23, with some increases in 2024 and a very strong 4th quarter of 2024, before the pace moderated and turned negative (-11%) in April this year.

Since not all of this bigger-picture news resonates with our experience here on the front lines in Manhattan Beach, we decided to crunch some (local) numbers, to see how they compare with what others are reporting.

To get you oriented with our chart above, we set up an unconventional 12-month year that ends in April. The purpose was to put the newest data (for April 2025) at one end, to make this moment a bit easier to review and compare.

We're looking at the number of closed sales per month, compared with the number of sales in the same month exactly one year prior.

The dark blue line goes back to May 2024, and represents a full's worth year of data ending just 2 weeks ago.

You will see that this 12-month stretch has been better all along than the prior one-year period since September 2024. (May and July 2024 were also better year-over-year.)

Now, what did Calculated Risk say, again?

"... sales will be down year-over-year for the third consecutive month..."

That simply hasn't happened yet in Manhattan Beach in 2025, or in fact, since a negative blip in August 2024. In no time since then do we see fewer sales in a month than in the same month the year before.

There is a little downtrend, if you insist on looking for "bad" news, which is that the amount by which 2025 is up over 2024 is lessening. That's the slope down from February's peak.

Now look above/below that 0 line again. 

Three of these past 5 Aprils have been down year-over-year. (Again, not this year.) One other year was higher YoY: April 2021.

Worth noting: If you want to see what grim news looks like, check out the orange line, which spans May 2022 through April 2023. All of that period is negative. That all-negative year followed the rally-ending spike in interest rates in May '22. (And no, we didn't choose orange for the color of the negative line as an insult to any public person in particular.)

Now, time for a little refresher.

If 2025 is pacing somewhat above 2024, that's good, because 2024 was itself a recovery year in our local market. That means potentially an even better outlook for this full year's stats.

Here's the total number of closed sales by year (Jan.-Dec.), from 2008-2024. (From this post.)

The data so far – for a precious few 4 months anyway – suggest an ongoing recovery.

But.

There's always a but.

Let's not get cocky. See this next chart.

This chart doesn't look nearly as rosy as the first line chart, does it?

Here, we are measuring current monthly sales versus the average for the same month.

For the "average," we used the average for all closed sales for a given month from 2015-2024, a 10-year period immediately preceding this year.

The goal of this calculation is to see how this year specifically (May '24-Apr. '25) looks compared to all the recent years that came before.

And here, we're mostly in negative territory over the past year, and negative right now, with April 2025 being 9 sales below the average for the 10 prior Aprils.

What that means is, while our local sales pace is recovering, it's still below average. That's not too surprising when you consider the annual sales totals, which have been low for 3 straight years.

This year, before the April dip, 2025 was +18 over the average pace of closed sales for the calendar year. Now, we're just +9. If we remained above average all year, that would make for a huge recovery year.

That won't happen if Spring months fall behind. If you want to see our Spring market make a splash, and see the year's data come in near or above average, we need closings in May and June to spike up again. 

Working on it...