While home sales are down this year in Manhattan Beach – not news! – the last couple of months have seen better numbers for both inventory and closed sales.
That's true both when compared to last year, and to some prior years.
You may recall that August 2023 was the best month of this year so far for closed sales.
Now we see that August-September 2023 combined was pretty good, too.
The total of 63 sales was much better than the same two months of 2022 (just 47!), and basically typical for sales for this period in most recent years – those that were not white-hot, markets (2020-21).
We'll take any semblance of normal where we can find it this year!
There's also a slightly increasing inventory trend, just comparing against where we've seen inventory totals the prior couple of years.
With 69 homes available at month's end (we've seen totals in the 70s, on and off, during the month), Manhattan Beach had more homes on the market than at the same time in 2021 or '22.
And if we dare to compare, the pattern again looks similar to 2013-15, which was followed by 5 years of much greater inventory. (The data now are very similar to what we showed you at mid-month in September.)
But it's still a year that's pretty tight compared to all others. We have charted all sales from the first 3 quarters (Jan. 1-Sept. 30), and it's just a big deficit right now.
Almost all of the "extra" sales produced in 2021 are now "missing" from 2023. Consider this chart.
The average across all 16 years here is 296 sales from Jan. 1-Sept. 30, but this year we've seen only 202.
(If we remove 2023 and use only 2008-2022 sales, the average is 303 sales for the first 3 quarters across the prior 15 years.)
So this year is about 101 off the pace of the prior 15 years, while 2021 had been almost 100 above pace.
The sales deficit is not really news, but more of a curiosity as to how severe the deficit is at any particular time. A late surge here in Q4 might reduce the scale of the deficit, but 2023 is still likely to fall below the 3 slowest years of the past 16 years: 2008, 2009 and 2022.
We also see continued "wobble" in the local median home price.
We don't have a new chart on this one yet, but Manhattan Beach's median price is back down to $2.787M, a drop of $113K in the median price from the end of August, and down $13K from the somewhat shocking $2.800M first reported here on MBC as July's numbers came in.
The new median price is the lowest since June 2021.
In May this year, the median home price for Manhattan Beach had been $3.100M.
October and part of November pretty much rounds out the market for real estate each year. Let's see what the market brings, and what buyers choose to do as time ticks by.
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Here's the rest of our local real estate market update report for the period ending 9/30/23:
> 69 active listings as of 9/30/23 (Flat from 9/15/23)
> 53 SFRs (+2)
> 16 THs (-2)
See the Inventory list as of 9/30/23 here, or see the MB Dashboard for up-to-the-minute data.
Active listings by region of Manhattan Beach in this report:
> Tree Section: 20 actives (-2)
> Sand Section: 26 actives (+2)
> Hill Section: 10 actives (-1)
> East MB: 13 actives (+1)
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 9/30/23".
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.
