Cliff here with my weekly update of the real estate market in Milton and Georgetown. This is for the week of May 3rd to the 9th. Before I get to that however, I thought I'd just discuss an inquiry I received the other day.  Someone contacted me about possibly selling their home and they asked, "How do you come through and evaluate a house these days?" Normally, in the past, what I would do is show up and I'd tour the house with the homeowners, looking at all the upgrades they have and any unusual features  Then we'd sit down at the kitchen table and basically I'd spread out all the recent sales and we'd analyze everything to figure out a price from there. But these days it's a little more challenging, due to COVID. What I do now is basically I ask you to either leave your keys under the mat, or leave the door open and wait in your driveway in your car or wait outside, now that the weather is nicer. I go through the house and take notes - what sort of flooring you have, if you have granite countertops, if you have a center island, stainless steel appliances, nine-foot ceilings, smooth ceilings, nice lot - it's all taken into consideration. Then, what I do is have a meeting outside, six feet apart, quickly. Or, what I'd like to do is go home, go to my office (which is home these days) and do a Skype/Zoom meeting, go through everything and come up with a price figure for you. That's basically how I evaluate a home these days. I think that's pretty much the only way to do it until things start to change anymore. The days of sitting down at the kitchen table and making a major decision are kind of gone for now, but they'll be back - just a matter of time. 

So onto the sales for May 3rd to the 9th, 2020. Milton first: In 2019, we had 60 sales that week. This week, 2020, we've had 14 sales. So, as we all know, it's not a surprise to anybody that sales numbers have dropped and the volume of sales have dropped. The prices have actually held pretty good, though. They've gone up a little bit in the past week, but that's nothing to really make me think there's a boom coming in the market just yet. The average detached was $865k last week and now it's $900k. The average semi two weeks ago was $801k, this week $713k. And the average townhouse two weeks ago was $718k and this week was $632k - so towns have come down a little bit. But again, those numbers don't really mean a lot. Since I do this update every week, I'm going to actually plot a graph soon to show how things are progressing. In my opinion, I can see things coming down slowly, maybe one percent per month. Our initial drop, back in March and April is kind of behind us, so now we're going to slowly come down and slowly come back up. But, question is: when?  That's what everybody wants to know! 

Then we move on to Georgetown: We've had eight sales last week in Georgetown. In 2019 we had 15, so we're down about almost half over last year - a little bit better than a lot of other areas, believe it or not. The average detached in the last week of sales was up, it was over a million, a million and 21. There were 7 detached sold. So it was a pretty busy week for detached homes. There were no semis sold and only one townhouse that was sold for $730k. The trend is up a little bit, townhouses up a little bit, detached were up huge. But the reason for that, you have to keep this in mind, is Georgetown is a bigger area.  You include rural, you include Glen Williams, I always include Glen Williams in my numbers, because even though it's the Glen, it's technically still Georgetown. So, there were two bigger properties sold on each line, well over a million, which kind of skewed the figures up a little bit. So if you're actually looking at right in town, the price of a detached is a lot lower than when you get acreage and a big lot, ravine lot - out of town.  So you can see the numbers are progressing as we kind of expected and there's no doom and gloom.  I post regularly on the internet, on Facebook, and I get responses saying, "Prices are coming down by 25 percent." It's almost like they expect that now. If they are, it would be very gradual, and it's going to be over a year or two. Then whatever you buy is coming down, too. So when you sell, it's going to effect first-time buyers because they're actually going to be able to get into the market if they have secure jobs. 

I'll have an update again next week. Any questions, please give me a call - I'm always around to take any questions. Advice is free and always will be. Thanks, take care, and stay safe.