Realtor Mark Slade Presents the South Orange 2022 Real Estate Recap

Hello, this is Mark Slade with Keller Williams and one of the Top Agents in Soma.

It’s always nice to be able to report positive news, so here goes: 2022 was a great year in real estate, so you can forget about all those things you hear nationally, because the National Market is quite a bit different. Why is this the case? Well, there is a lot of new home construction in areas where there is a good amount of land available to build on. Here in South Orange, as you probably know, there is only an eye-dropper’s worth of available land on which to build a new home. As a result, we don’t have inflated inventory to sell and that’s good since supply and demand are two key variables in housing market performance. We are also a NYC bedroom community, so we have additional reasons to have a much stronger real estate market compared to the country as a whole.

Let’s look at the statistics for 2022. For starters, the average list price rose to $810,591, which is a 6% increase over the previous year’s $762,000. More importantly, the average sales price went up to just around $905,000 rose, which is almost an 11.6% increase over the previous year. It’s great to see that we now have a “9” before the average selling price. This performance represents approximately a 4 times better performance when considering that the average lifetime growth in prices for Real Estate is between 3% and 4%.

With constant buyer demand for homes in our area, it is clear that the limited inventory (supply) we have seen in the general area has caused a dramatic decrease in the number of units – only 162 homes are in 2022 South Orange sells and that represents a drop of 43 percent compared to the previous year (2021). By comparison, sales of Maplewood units were down 34 percent, with 253 homes sold there.

Listed by The Slade Team for $500,000 and sold for $625,000

As one can imagine, the lack of inventory produced higher sales prices, also leading to a decrease in Days on Market, polling at 17.8 days. This is good news for sellers because it means homes sell that much faster, so there is less disruption in sellers’ lives when selling their properties.

The highest listing price in 2022 was $1.8 million and that property sold for its asking price of $1.8 million. While you might have assumed that was the highest sale price in SOMA, that title goes to Maplewood in 2022 where the highest sale price on record was $2,250,000.

Believe it or not, there was a property in South Orange that surprisingly sold for 158% of its asking price or $468,000 over its asking price. It was just a phenomenal result, but conversely we had a property that sold for 28 below asking or 72 percent of the asking price.

The number of homes that sold for more than a million totaled 56 in 2022, representing a drop of 10 from 2021’s 66 properties that sold for more than $1,000,000. If we don’t let the statistics play with our heads because there was such a dramatic decrease in the number of available properties for sale, the results in 2022 were actually an improvement when you look at the percentage of million dollar homes relative to the total. Million dollar homes represented 35 percent of the market in 2022 while the same ratio was 22% in 2021.

Listed by The Slade Team for $650,000 and sold for $802,500

I also like to track performance in three buckets: Homes that sold for over asking, homes that sold at Ask, and homes that sold for less than asking. Of the 162 homes sold in 2022, 78% sold for too much, another 9% sold for ask, meaning 87% of properties sold for ask and above in 2022. Of course, that leaves 13% for properties selling below asking—that’s the lowest recorded you can imagine in the last four years.

So now you know that it’s been another great year for real estate in South Orange and while the returns aren’t necessarily as high as they were at the start of last year, we’re still expecting good things for the first half of 2023. If you know of anyone looking for a listing agent and wants advice on how to increase the selling price of your property, we have a book we can give you how to sell your home for more money. We also want you to know that our team sold our listings at 24% over asking, which is more than twice the township average in 2022. If you have any questions feel free to call or text me at 917-797-5059 and have a great day.