 Hi, I'm Sarah Mauro, Realtor with Cell State Peak Realty. Welcome to episode two of Property Time. Today we're discussing your home's value, a hot topic that sellers, buyers, and curious, looky-loos seem to want answers about. Today we're mostly touching on trends and shifts that we experts are seeing here in Longmont, Colorado, and I am thrilled to introduce my expert of the expert's friend and mentor, Kyle Snyder, of First American Title. Kyle has a relentless attitude of gratitude. He's been in the industry for over 20 years. He is the king of stats, a passionate debunker of myths and assumptions, and he really knows his stuff. A home can't seem to go under contract in northern Colorado without Kyle knowing about it, and he seems to know everybody, and he's a ton of fun to do deals with. Thank you so much, Sarah. That is very sweet. You're welcome. Thanks for being here. I wouldn't have missed the opportunity. Awesome. So we've been hearing words like cooling down a lot, and we hear this every fall, and we don't just mean the temperatures. So which indicators are you seeing that things actually are slowing in the market? Which indicators are you seeing? No signs of slowing, speaking particularly about competition and sales. Okay. We're going to take a couple laps around the block on this one, okay? Back in August of 2018, we finally broke $500,000 for our average price in Longmont. In October of last year, we broke that record for the fourth time. So that was a very hot time in the market. Well, the last four consecutive months, we've broken the record. Four months. Four straight months, we've set a new record to last month. The all-time high, excuse me, of my glasses, I'm getting a little old, she thinks it's funny, is $634,000. That's a pretty quick change. That's a pretty big, pretty steep incline in prices. Yeah. And so competition, it's still there. Right. Additionally, we have nearly the same number of sales from the first half of last year to the first half of this year. Okay. And last year, it was the second highest ever. So we're busy. There's a lot of sales happening. There's still a lot of activity. Yep. So the monthly sales prices, they're limited in their impact because it's just a month. Right. So you can have wild swings. Sure. So we look at the average price for the entire first half of the year. Okay. Well, it's the highest ever. And it keeps climbing. Again. Yes. Up 16%. So these are things that I look at that are long-term trends. That's a good way to look at it because monthly ups and downs don't really tell the full story. Got it. Got it. Thank you for that. Now, here's where it, there's where I try to make the argument that it's maybe not so much hot, that is. You mean that it is cooling down? That it may be cooling down. So in June, our days on market were down 52%. So we went from 53 last year to 25 this year. Okay. That's quite a bit down. That's almost half. Yes. It's 52.8% down. In July, we were 36% down. In August, we're 45% down. So things are sitting a little longer than they were. Starting to sit just a little bit longer. But what's a little bit? If we look at sold price to list price, that's kind of a hot topic because we've seen that go up. Yep. So here's our numbers since April. 105%. Okay. May 108%. May was hot. Hot, hot. June, 106. Yep. July 105. August 103. So we're not pegging the meter anymore, but it's like going from Mach 2 to maybe Mach 1. I love it. Thank you so much, Kyle, for those indicators. What would you tell a Northern Colorado seller who's been considering selling their house all year but just hasn't pulled the trigger? Why now? It sounds like the best time would have been May, right? May and June were ridiculous. I didn't even enjoy my job in May or June, to be honest. But should they sell now because it's going to start getting to 103? Should they wait? A lot of them want to wait. I mean, people are sitting on the fence. What would you tell them? Get off the fence and do something. You know, first thing, I think for the first time, you really got to plan a little bit harder on an exit strategy. Last month, I put out some suggestions of where people can go. 25 most affordable beach towns, best places to retire abroad, things like this. Now, in the last 18 months, we've learned that we can go anywhere. We don't need to retire to go to Florida. We can go there just to work for our job. So plan where do you want to be? If you want to be across town, call Sarah. She's got the MLS access. But if you want to be in North Carolina... Make it happen. Make it happen. You'll find them a realtor there, right? Sure. And waiting, you're saying, is really not going to bode well. You know, last year, people wanted to wait. Year before that, people wanted to wait. Year before that, people wanted to wait. Not only is the price of the house going up that they're going to sell, the house that they're buying... It's going up, too. The prices are going up, too. Yep. They're not going down anywhere. Not anywhere soon, either. No. People know that. But it is, you know, there's a little bit of analysis paralysis I'm noticing. There's a lot of big decisions to make. There's COVID variant coming. I can understand it, but I appreciate you driving the same train as me that says, now's the time. One of the other things I would say is don't overprice your house. You know, a lot of that 108% was driven by listed here, sold here. If you now list here and think you're going to sell here, you're kidding yourself. Yeah. You still got a list competitively. Yep. Yeah. Recalibrate those expectations a little bit. And you know, you don't fight the market as much, either, because you have appraisals and inspections and, you know, issues that come up in our normal. Right. When buyers are skipping over those because they had to to fulfill those obligations. It doesn't end well. Yeah. They were doing unethical things like saying, oh, I have all the cash in the bank to buy this house and then changing to financing somewhere down the line. Flipping the script. Yeah, I saw that. Okay. You mentioned a little bit about year over year, late summer trends. Can you speak again to, I get a lot of questions about, you know, this cool down, but particularly the late August, early September time that we're in. Can you talk about that transition? School has started, temperatures outside are cooling off. Like what is happening and is it different from what happened in 18, 19, 20? This is one of my favorite discussions right now. What we've seen in the last couple of years have taken us away from reality. The demand and the pricing has been so high, there has not been the typical dip in the fall. It happens every year. There's a pattern. And I've got a great graphic here that you're going to put on this after editing. And it's going to show you how normally these sales cycles happen. In a normal market. In a normal market. And then we're going to see the last couple of years how that's not normal. But this year, we're filling back into the normal, falling back into the normal cycle. You mean kind of what happened in 15, 16, 17? Yeah. In some of the hottest markets ever. But we're falling back into a regular trend and it feels like the sky's falling. It's not. Because we're not used to it. We're not used to it. We've taken out of it. We've been taken out of the normal cycle. Sure. Sure. Well, thank you for that. That makes sense. And I look forward to looking at those graphs myself. I do get them in my email. You, on a personal level, recently, I think just this summer around that hot time, you personally sold your primary residence. You purchased a new home obviously for you and your family. And you had a lot of fixing and rehabbing to do. Why don't you tell us a little bit about why you did it, when you did it, how it turned sort of the numbers a little bit? Well, my wife and I have been real estate investors for some time now. I've bought and sold almost every type of property there is, residentially, from a 12 plex to condos, single-family homes. We flipped a few of them over in Boulder and in Longmont. Let's say that bull market is a tough one to work in. Especially now. Yes. So this was that opportunity. The house across the street from my father, became available. The older people moved away and we got, we were able to acquire the property at a reasonable price. It needed a lot of work. Congratulations. Yes. This was, this was one of the neighborhoods here in Longmont, yeah? Yes, Longmont Estates. Of course. Lovely area. Yep. So we were able to acquire the house and it needed a lot of work. So after about a month of work, demo, on a walk, we came to the decision that we wanted this house. It's a unique custom 1968 ranch with a wonderful view. Nice. And it's a Longmont story. It's a coming home. We live immediately across the street from my father who's married to my wife's second grade teacher. We can see. What? Yes. We can, we can see a house that I lived in as a child. Michelle had a paper route. Wow. Around that area. Our friends, parents lived down the street. So we didn't, we didn't want to just flip this house. We didn't want to put, you know, lipstick on it. This house needed. Love. Yes. And you were ready to give it. And we were. And our kids are in college. We're empty nesters. Hey, let's sell this house. We didn't want to leave our neighbors. Denise Jacobs, she's near and dear to her heart and her whole family, but we left and moved across town and are in this house and we'll be there for some time and we love it. It's a gem. Awesome. But you know, we're participants in the market and we sold last November. Okay. Same model house of ours sold six months later for 50 grand more. Do you, do you, do you look back on that and say we missed an opportunity? No, because then we wouldn't have had the house that we live in now. Right. So you have to, you know, I appreciate that sentiment. Everything happens for a reason they say. It does. And you came full circle. I love that story. Living across the street from my father is, is awesome. It's a blessing. Yes. I haven't lived that close to him since I was in high school. You and he and Michelle deserve it. Congratulations. Yeah. Judy and Michelle get along. Nice. Nice. So we've been hearing a lot of buzz about Longmont's demand really spiking, particularly right now. Like you, you mentioned competition. We've been hearing that we're the next NYWA. We're the next gun barrel. What are you seeing that supports this? And how does that compare to Frederick Firestone, birthed, eerie, superior? Well, what's so great about Longmont right now? Well, Longmont's the best that always have been, right? Other than that. I mean, that's a given. Right. So, um, it's my, my reaction to when people say that is it's about time. It makes sense. It's our time. It's, it's, it's finally that time and it should have happened, I feel, years ago. But when you have, Boulder's been over a million dollars in average price for probably a couple years. Several years, it seems. And before that, what? They were in the 900s. They were in 800s. That was very expensive territory. And so people didn't want to spend that money there. So they would move to Lafayette, Louisville, Superior area, better access to the Denver Metro area. Kind of proximity that they wanted. Yep. Better proximity to sports, concerts, bars, eating, whatever it is. Well, after a time, those places get very expensive. There's seven, $800,000 average prices. Right. Where do you go next? You go to the most affordable town in all of Boulder County where we have been for forever. We have been. And so then people start moving here, uh, bidding up the prices. Yep. There is still a shortage of homes in the United States. So this demand is not going, 5.5 million homes are needed now. I heard, well, I heard 5, I heard 4.5. Now it's up to 5.5. Yeah, it keeps growing every day. Not builders. And so there's no demand going away. We have all these millennials moving out of the basement. They're tired of living in mom's basement. They're getting married, buying houses. You know, general population growth itself. It's ridiculous. These things are happening within a housing shortage. So demand won't stop and demand for less expensive homes won't stop. So we will get more expensive here. And when people get tired of paying these prices, they're going to go to Firestone. They're going to go to Birthing. They're going to go to Loveland. And we're already seeing some of that. We are. We have been. But in terms of Longmont, would you say, you know, how do you feel about this? How does it, what does it look like for us? How quickly are we going to get to the 900 range? Do you think? It's going to be a while. It's going to be, I mean, that's still a couple years out. Yeah, that's still 40% increase. So that's going to be some time. And I think there's, you know, boulders up in the 1.2, 1.4 range. So we're not going to creep up that quickly. Right. I think with some infrastructure and services and such like that in Longmont, you'll start to see that. But right now we're better. We're becoming a better community for Boulder. And we've been that way for a long time. Yeah. We're still within an hour, hour commute even less. Yeah. You can still make the mile high same in less than an hour. Right. What is the average price right now for a single family home in Longmont? I know it changes on the monthly, but. So for the year, it's through the first half of the year. That's right. That's I have and it's 584,000. 584. Yeah. Okay. That's significant. That is. That is. It's significantly more than when I moved here. And I'm grateful for that. Kyle, you've been wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. That's the property.