Wednesday, July 9, 2008

Dane County's most consistent real estate market

Year in and year out the Madison West single family home market continues to be Dane County's most consistent market. We'll take a closer look at this market over the next few days by comparing it to the larger Dane County market.

We define the Madison West market as all of the Madison MLS locations W01 through W18. Of course there are many different "micro-markets" within the west side of Madison, down to the neighborhood level. We'll cover some of these neighborhoods in more detail throughout the year.





The west side of Madison has proven that it is home to stable home prices. Take a look at this graph which compares the median price growth for single family homes in the Madison West and Dane County markets, dating back to 2001.


The median price growth for Madison West homes ranged between 6.8% and 13.2% from 2001 through 2004, consistently out-performing the larger Dane County market. In 2005, price growth slowed to about 2% per year. Although Dane County median price growth slowed to .9% in 2007, the Madison West market stayed the course at 2.1%.
As of May 31st of this year, the year-to-date median price for a Madison West home has decreased by .2%, while the median price for a Dane County home has decreased by 1.8% (see our year-to-date snapshot at DaneCountyMarket.com). The west side of Madison continues to perform well given the cooling of the overall market; the Dane County market continues to fare well when compared to trends at the national level.
One big reason for the success of the Madison West single family home market is that the west side of Madison has the fewest months of inventory in all of Dane County. As of June 30th, there were 6.4 months of inventory on Madison's west side, compared to 8.8 months for all of Dane County.


In fact, virtually every area within Madison's west side has fewer months of inventory than the Dane County average of 8.8. Note how the W11 and W13 areas on the near-west side only have 3 and 4.1 months of inventory respectively.



In our next post, we'll cover the listing success rate for homes on Madison's west side.

For more information on the Madison West single family home market, feel free to visit these pages at DaneCountyMarket.com:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It would be interesting to see the graph re: time on my market by location on a map, updated on a monthly basis. Historical maps from different time periods would also be interesting (e.g. the month of June for the last 5 years).

Is there a strong correlation between months on market and distance from downtown Madison?

Dan Miller said...

I like your suggestions, and we'll work to address them in the future. Monthly updates may be difficult to implement due to the time involved with gathering and publishing the data. Also, the lower sample sizes for a monthly timeframe may lead to some wild swings in the data, so a year-to-date view of total required marketing time may be a good alternative.