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Good morning
Halstead Open House Index aficionados!
Happy New
Year! May the traffic at your open houses in 2020 always be above the
average!
What did you
do to send 2019 packing and to welcome 2020? To start off the New
Year I went to see “To Kill A Mocking Bird” on Broadway last night. The show was superb. So relevant
today, as racism and anti-Semitism is raising its ugly head. I
couldn’t understand all of the dialogue because of the southern accents, but if you have a chance to see it I strongly recommend
it!
Here is my report from the last
weekend in 2019. I did not go into details of re-capping the data. We
received just 44 replies (Here is the dataset. It was a very
slow weekend in term of total open houses held: just 1944 in all of
NYC). The average was 3.23 (last year on December 30, 2018 it was
3.27), and you can see the details for each area and category below. Please do
not look into the numbers too deeply – super small sample sizes are totally
deceiving. See the numbers below. (if you see empty space, it means I
did not receive a single entry from that specific category or area).
The most
visited open house was the one reported by Jay Safire of Mossada
Home Sales in Brooklyn. At 203 Chrystal Street in Brooklyn
he greeted 12 people on Sunday. Here, in his own words: "Good
morning and happy new year, I like to follow your reports! Please be
aware that most of the attendees came through street signs, so
i'm not sure if you can count them all. I know that 2 or 3 were
probably just curious neighbors but at least 3 others told me that
they are actively searching. I think at this price level a street
sign can still be effective. The building itself is a fully renovated
brick 2 family with private parking, completely redone, with 2
central-air systems. We got offers around the mid 8 which the
owner/developer rejected for now. The house is easy to show, and we
are happy to co-broke!"
I received an interesting comment from Pascal Blacque-Belair
from Douglas Elliman last week. He wrote in response to my data
and analysis from this past Friday:
“Fritz,
A few
points:
1) The difference between Sat and Sun
OH attendance is mostly due to fact that most (95%?) OHs are held on
Sundays. It’s not a preference one way or another, it’s just the way
it’s been – Saturdays are salespeople’s day off, sort of. If we
started having more Saturday OHs, the number would be different.
2) Open house numbers in $4MM and up
segment are not very useful … to the extent most of these buyers
prefer private appointments over OHs with other buyers … for
different reasons.
3) The key insight is the attendance
increase in first OH … yes I agree that it shows that buyers don’t
want to miss out if they like the place … and are fully aware that
there are many buyers like them, waiting to pull the trigger. Bidding
wars are just beneath the surface … you can feel the buzzzz.
2020 is the
turnaround year … that’s already the case in the $4MM+ segment. It
led on the way down (since 2015) and it is leading on the way back up
(since last November)”
I love his
optimism! Do you agree with him? What’s your forecast for 2020? Will
the market recover and the buyers come back? I firmly believe that with tracking open house attendance we will be able
to spot the next growth point, not maybe the exact moment, but
certainly a 4-5 weeks trend, if it occurs.
What to
expect in January? Those of you who read my reports from 2017 will
know that we receive a strong bump in attendance in January. On January 6, 2019 the average was 4.21. For all
weekends in January in 2019 only once did the average drop below 4.00. The same was in
February. Last year we received 238 replies on January 6, 2019. Let’s
beat these numbers.
My goal is
to receive 10% of all open houses in NYC. The stats and averages will
be much more meaningful and reliable if we get more data. Together we
can do it, please encourage your colleagues in the industry to
participate.
Best of luck
with attendance on this January 4-5 weekend!
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