Comparing My 2017 Housing Market Predictions To Reality

As shown above, I was horribly inaccurate with my prediction of how many home sales we would see in 2017.  After a 16% increase in the pace of sales between 2015 and 2016 I thought I was being sufficiently conservative to only point to a potential 4% increase in the pace of sales between 2016 and 2017.  Perhaps what I did not fully account for was the limiting impact of low inventory levels -- which I believe are a key reason why we did not see more home sales in 2017.  So -- not only did we not see 1350 home sales in 2017 (as I predicted) we also did not see 1301 home sales (the 2016 total).  We ended up with right around 1,254 home sales for 2017.

Now, let's see how I did in predicting market values in 2017....


Woah!  I think I'm going to say his prediction mattered much more than the first.  :)

As you can see -- I predicted that we would see the median sales price climb from $192,900 up to $198,500 in 2017.  And --- it did!  The median sales price for the 1,254 sales reported thus far in the Harrisonburg-Rockingham MLS show a median sales price of.... $198,500!

That means (as conveniently shown in this one year old graph above) we ended up seeing a 3% increase in median sales prices -- only slightly below the 4% increases seen in 205 and 2016.

Stay tuned for some predictions for 2018 in the coming days!