Manhattan Beach Market Update for 4/15/22

If the Spring market has seemed tough so far (it has), is it any consolation to hear that it's only the third-worst of the past 10 years?

We're going by only one measure here: The number of new escrows in a specific period, the first full six weeks of the typical Spring market.

From March 1-April 15, we saw 50 new escrows open in Manhattan Beach from publicly listed inventory.

This was a drop of 20 new deals and 29% from last year, and down 14 deals (-22%) from the average of 64 set over the prior 9 years.

But hey, we were better than March/April 2020! Oh yeah, the shutdown.

As you can see from a glance at the graph, there is a lot of annual variation in the number of deals made within this 6-week period.

The raging 2013 Spring market was not quite matched in 2014, things got cooler in '15 and it looked anemic in 2016.

The sluggish 2016 early Spring market in fact set the stage for a wobbly Fall and lots of talk about how the market might turn. But as you see, 2017's Spring took off like a rocket.

So we try not to draw too firm of an inference from any segment of data. You can't readily spot trends that tell you a market will "turn."

Heck, March/April 2019 was the 5th-best of this crop, but that year ended with the median price down, one of the very rare times that has happened recently. Was that a good year? Discuss.

We know that demand is very high these days, and the biggest problems from the buyers' side are low inventory, high competition and high prices.

We have a "third worst" Spring market mainly because there are far fewer homes for buyers to buy.

Some properties that buyers did find and buy during the first part of April:

2812 Oak (4br/3ba, 3843 sqft.), asking $2.799M

1720 Oak (4br/4ba, 3471 sqft.) asking $3.499M

1906 Agnes (4br/3ba, 2985 sqft.) asking $3.250M

1116 N. Ardmore (3br/3ba, 1814 sqft.) asking $2.700M

227 Aviation Place (3br/3ba, 1646 sqft.) asking $1.250M

2220 The Strand (3br/3ba, 1552 sqft.) asking $4.995M

4314 The Strand (3br/4ba, 2649 sqft.) asking $5.275M

Here's the rest of our local real estate market update report for the period ending 4/15/22:

> 30 active listings as of 4/15/22 (-4 from 3/31/22) 

> 24 SFRs (-2)

> 6 THs (-2)

See the Inventory list as of 4/15/22 here, or see the MB Dashboard for up-to-the-minute data.

Active listings by region of Manhattan Beach in this report:

> Tree Section: 5 actives (+1)

> Sand Section: 16 actives (-2)

> Hill Section: 5 actives (flat)

> East MB: 4 (-3)

We're also providing a report on closed sales by region of MB

Sales data, including PPSF for all properties, are organized by sub-region of Manhattan Beach.

Here's a link to the spreadsheet: "MB Pending/Sold as of 4/15/22".