Anchorage Real Estate Market Update

*the following is a transcript from my weekly market update on the "Alaska Realtor" YouTube channel. To watch the update, go watch it there*

My name is Jamin Goecker. I'm a realtor in southcentral Alaska and my mission is to help you to build an intentional and significant legacy for yourself and your family by coaching you in real estate and to help you do that today I went ahead and created a market update for what's going on in in Anchorage.

This is obviously the biggest market that we have in all of Alaska so it's one that we keep a pretty close eye on if you're trying to see what's going on in Alaska as far as real estate goes. Let's go and jump into today's market update looking at the residential the condo and the multi-family market.

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Residential

Active Inventory?

The first thing we're going to look at is the residential market and the first thing the residential market we're going to look at is the amount of active inventory now over here what we've seen

is there's been a pretty significant cut in the inventory even year over day because last year was an anomaly and it was low on inventory this year it's even more so last year was about 520 homes that are on the market now it's about 380. So you see a pretty big drop in the in the inventory.

Units Sold

The next thing we're going to look at is what's going on as far as the sold units go so here we do have a bit of a drop more so than we've seen for the rest of the year and that is it went from about 360 homes that were sold this time last year to about 330 homes that were sold this year. This is significant because as you can see looking at the rest of the graph here, most of the time this year we've actually been right at or actually above what we've sold for the previous year. We'll talk more about why that might be in the summary but just something to keep an eye on.

Average Sold Price

The next thing we need to pay attention for what's going on as far as the residential market goes is what's going on in the average sold price so it's actually gone up 7.2 percent year over date, so what we see is this time last year the average sold price was right about $397 000 now it's about $425 000. That's a pretty sizable spike in the average sold price for properties here in the area is that going to continue

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Condos

??????????????Active Inventory

The next thing we're going to look at is what's going on in the condo market. This time last year there were about there were about 340 condos there on the market now we're seeing it's a lot closer to about to about 230 so what you see really across the board

??????????????Sold Units

The next thing we're going to look at is just what's going on for the number of sold condos in this market so what we see is the number of condos that sold this time last year was about 130 and now what we're seeing is it's actually about 116. So definitely a drop in the number of ?condos that have sold year over date and that's definitely an indicator for how the market's doing.

??????????????Average Sold Price

The average sold price so the average sold price has gone up by six percent year over date because we're at roughly $216 000 this time last year; now it's about $230 000 so even on the condo market we are seeing that the average sold price is going up at a faster rate than what we've seen in previous years.

Multi-Family

Active

We see that this time last year there were 190 properties that were available and this year we're seeing it's roughly about 137 properties that are available now. We are definitely seeing kind of a decrease in the overall amount of inventory that's available for multi-families in Anchorage.

Units Sold

The next thing that we want to look at is the number of properties that have actually sold this time last year 47 properties sold this year 49. So even with inventory being down so much, we're still seeing that we are selling quite a few properties.

Average Sold Price

The next thing we're going to look at is the average sold price, which has definitely increased from what we usually see so it's gone it's increased by about 13 year-to-date compared to this time last year so the average sold price this time last year is about $434 435 000. Now it's about $490 000. That's obviously a pretty significant uptick for what we usually see for multi-family properties in Anchorage. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that these are just overall averages and it doesn't really account for the fact that the average sold price for multi-family properties has probably gone up but it's also not accounting for the fact that this does include everything from the little duplex all the way up to the big commercial deal for 30 units or something like that. It includes everything together but I have no doubt that the average sold price has gone up for multi-families.

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Summary

Residential

The overall number of properties that have sold has increased by 10.5 percent and this is also really telling that it continues to be a hot market. The number the days on market has also decreased from 41 days on the market to 22 days. This is obviously a big deal because it means the market has really accelerated compared to this time last year, and that's really what we're seeing across the board is that properties in this market are moving quickly. That's probably not going to go away anytime soon as long as the interest rates remain low and the demand remains high.

We're likely going to have a lot of people who want to buy houses but not a whole lot that are

available because a lot of sellers don't want to sell right now because they can't find anything that's available. It's this vicious cycle that's keeping not a lot of properties on the market right now but that's going to change as soon as interest rates start going up, demand starts going down and then we're probably going to see a bit of a relaxing in the market on the residential side.

Condos

What we're seeing over here is the number of sold units is increased by about 28% so this is huge difference from what we saw this time last year and that's definitely is reflective also in the number of days on the market that we're seeing. There's about a 27 drop in the number of days on market so this is all pretty significant despite the fact that kind of across the board inventories remain within about 20 units of each other month over month. The number of properties that have actually sold has increased dramatically year over date

Multi-Family

The number of properties that have sold in the multi-family sector has increased by 35% days on market has gone from about 73 to 52. This is significant because it does tell us there's still a lot of demand for multi-family properties in anchorage not quite as much as what we're seeing in the Matsu valley because the Assembly’s actions have made it less agreeable to be an investor in Anchorage. It's still agreeable to a lot of investors in Anchorage because the cost of rent has gone up, which makes a lot of properties feasible from an investment standpoint. There are some good options for investors, but you must make sure that you're not using old investment models and just trying to find underpriced properties. That doesn't happen as much in this market. You need to find properties that are under rented (i.e., they’re rented for $1000 a month, but they could be rented for $1300) or not being used to their highest and best use with the zoning.