One of my readers asked an excellent question after reading my latest real estate market report:

A colleague is looking for an acreage tract for a new home but is frustrated because there "isn't much listed for sale" they say.

For the 2009 comparison to be more meaningful, it seems that the number of closings should be correlated to the number of listed parcels.  Otherwise, one could conclude that there is either a lot of land for sale and closings are slow or one could conclude that there is not much for sale and closings are actually significant in relation to available land.  Can you produce a report for your MLS system for listed parcels above one acre in size?

Further can you look at that for the average number of months that parcels are on the market? 

As you can see in this graph below, there have indeed been very few land sales (greater than 1 acre) this year --- in fact, 17 such transactions.



So, how many such properties are even for sale these days?  There are 194 properties in Rockingham County on the market for sale that are one acre or more.  Of note, that is a 5.7 year supply of properties, to the extent that 17 sold in the first six months of 2009.

Of those properties:

• 111 are between 1 and 5 acres
• 36 are between 5 and 15 acres
• 30 are between 15 and 50 acres
• 16 are more than 50 acres

As to the time it took for them to sell, of the first 16 properties:

• 6 sold in the first four months
• 8 sold in 5-12 months
• 2 sold in more than a year
• The average time it took to sell a lot was 187 days.