In real estate, we're believers in the market.
What makes real estate so interesting and confounding at times is that the market is imperfect. It's mysterious.
Pricing on a given home might reflect true value, or just what a particular owner wants or needs.
How to figure out which listings are properly priced, and which are, erm, too ambitious?
Sometimes, you just have to let the whole process play out.
In the latter half of August, a few listings closed, casting light on how perhaps their starts were, in fact, ambitious.
2304 Pine (3br/2ba, 2080 sqft.) is a very dated, although charming-in-its-way, slice of old Manhattan Beach.
The listing began in May at $2.749M. Our remark at the time was: "Priced well above apparent land value, this one invites a buyer to give the home a top-to-bottom renovation."
Five weeks into the listing, the price was down $250K to $2.499M, where it sat another couple of weeks.
The buyer who did come took a bigger discount, an additional $269K in fact, closing it up at $2.230M.
The total sale price was 19% below the start price, and much, much closer to land value for this nice block of the Trees. (We know at least one nearby owner who was hoping against hope that the $2.749M ask was market – we tried to say, Nah, don't get your hopes up, watch it play out... and now it has.)
932 Manhattan Beach Blvd. Unit B (3br/3ba, 2031 sqft.) is as snazzy modern TH built in 2010. It's a rear unit, so the address seems to overstate what could be a worry about location.
This one debuted at $2.199M in late April, making two cuts to $2.099M by early June. There it sat for 6 weeks, unsold.
Evidently frustrated that the property hadn't sold, they canceled the listing and re-listed it immediately at a lower price: $1.999M.
Aha! said the market. That's a great price. Almost too great!
It was under contract in 5 days.
And this time, the market agreed with that June/July price. The closing was $2.099M, up $100K from the "new" (re-listed) asking price, $100K under the "original" asking price, and right where they had the listing priced for the longest period of time.
Oh, they just knew it was priced right all that time! Summer buyers just weren't there at first.
716 33rd (4br/2ba, 1561 sqft.) is a mostly original home on a street-to-alley lot in a good location.
Indeed, the offering was really, really about the location, and the 5000-odd-sqft. street-to-alley lot.
But they insisted on presenting the early-1950s cottage as the sort of place you'd want to spruce up a little and move right in, despite its being so small, very original, and high-priced at $3.200M.
Just like 2304 Pine above, the price was obviously far higher than land value, while the value for the dollar just wasn't there.
The description had several florid turns of phrase designed to convince you that the home should remain. There was virtual staging to convince you that the home could look great once you got your designer in there to go to work.
What got the property moving was price cuts: Two big ones totaling nearly $600K.
Now, the sale has closed for $2.630M, 18% under that start, and up on the healthy/high end of values for anything similar in the area – including pure land sales.
Worth noting: The sellers had actually cut the listing to $2.599M, so the final price was a modest overbid, after all that initial overreaching...
In all three of these cases, the market figured out where the proper values were, whether the sellers were high or, temporarily, low.
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Here's the rest of our local real estate market update report for the period ending 8/31/24:
> 75 active listings as of 8/31/24 (-13 from 8/15/24)
> 58 SFRs (-9)
> 17 THs (-4)
See the Inventory list as of 8/31/24 here, or see the MB Dashboard for up-to-the-minute data.
Active listings by region of Manhattan Beach in this report:
> Tree Section: 11 actives (-3)
> Sand Section: 37 actives (-6)
> Hill Section: 6 actives (-2)
> East MB: 21 actives (-2)
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 8/31/24".
Please see our blog disclaimer.
Listings presented above are supplied via the MLS and are brokered by a variety of agents and firms, not Dave Fratello or Edge Real Estate Agency, unless so stated with the listing. Images and links to properties above lead to a full MLS display of information, including home details, lot size, all photos, and listing broker and agent information and contact information.
