Comparing My 2019 Housing Market Predictions To Reality

As shown above, I was slightly (just slightly) too optimistic about the pace of home sales that we would see in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County in 2019.  I was predicting that we'd see a 2.2% increase to 1,325 home sales -- and we only saw a 1.6% increase to 1,317 home sales.  So -- pretty close -- we did see a slight increase in the pace of home sales, and it was less than the 3% that we saw in 2018.  Just as I observed last year -- even though we had low inventory levels all year long, buyers still found homes to buy -- which created a slight increase in the pace of sales, and a further decline in "days on market" in 2019.

If I was ever-so-slightly too bold in my prediction as to the pace of home sales, I was too conservative in my prediction as to the change in median sales price we'd see during 2019.  I was predicting we'd see a 2.4% increase to a median sales price of $217,000 -- and we actually saw a 5.7% increase to a median sales price of $224,000 in 2019.  This is similar to the 6.9% increase that we saw in 2018.  So, we did see a smaller increase (5.7% is smaller than 6.9%) during 2019 than we saw in 2018 -- but it was still a larger increase than has been seen in most recent years.