Montclair New Jersey Real Estate Market Report

On the eighth day of the holidays, Jersey gave to me a Montclair Real Estate Market Report. Gotta see. From skyrocketing prices to surprising trends, welcome to the 12 Days of Jersey Real Estate Market Report. Each day, we'll unwrap key insights to help you buy or sell smarter this season. Let's kick it off. Hey, I'm Jeff Massey, your local realtor here in the area. And whether you're moving in the next seven days or seven months, give us a call, shoot us a text, or send us an email so we can help you make an easy, stress-free purchase or sale and get you to the closing table. What we're gonna do today and over the next couple days is look at specific towns that we talk about a lot on the channel. A lot of them are midtown direct. And we're gonna be ranking them from most affordable to most expensive. So what I'd like for you to do is guess which town is gonna come up each time. And then what we can do is see which one you think is gonna be the most expensive. I think it's gonna catch a few people off guard. But again, we're gonna look at most of the towns that we've talked about or highlighted on the channel. But before we get into that, I'd like to tell you about an upcoming buyer's seminar they're gonna be doing on January 12th, 2025. And if you click the QR code over here, actually, it'll take you to a Zoom registration for the webinar. And we're gonna be doing that on 8 p.m. It's a Sunday night. We'll be going through the buying process, getting people comfortable with any questions they might have. And then afterwards, if you'd like to schedule a one-on-one appointment, I'd love to do that and get to know you a little bit more personally. There'll also be a link down below in the description if you're on a phone, if it's easier to click that, and you could fill out the webinar form. All right, so it's day number eight in the 12 Days of Jersey. And as you know, we talked about at the top that today's town is going to be Montclair, making Montclair number five out of the most expensive towns on the 12 Days of Jersey. And so let's jump into the data and look at some of the numbers here so we can understand more what's happening and why that position occurred. And right off the bat, we're looking at new listings, and this is number of 12 months trailing. So in this particular example, the beginning of 2023, we saw 455 homes sold, trailing 12 months. So if we look at the beginning of 2024, that was down to a low of 319. And as you can see here, for 2024, there's definitely an uptick overall and even ending on a positive uptick with 372 new listings. So not quite back to the beginning of 2023 or even the 2022 levels with hitting 500 there and then back to over 700 in 2021. But you can see a little bit of an upward trajectory there. That's good to see. So now let's go and see how many of those closed out of 372 and see how consistent that was. So 291, so a little bit lower, and it closed on a little bit of a low there. Actually, interesting is that number, that trend is a little bit flat there for 2024. So about 80 listings that didn't close. And again, that could be sellers changing their mind, maybe they weren't priced appropriately, whatever. They sat a little bit longer, sellers change their mind. There's a number of factors there that can affect that. But interestingly, the peak of 304, we're basically kind of matching the exact start of 2024 with the end of 2024 there with the 291 in terms of closed transactions. Kind of a small trend line upward. We're hoping to see if that changes in 2025, if we really see more people kind of normalizing to these interest rates. And if they do tick down a little bit over time, if that is gonna bring sellers back to the market. So let's look at days on market median in terms of Montclair. And it looks like 14 days, a little bit higher than some of the other towns, some of them been 12 days, 13 days. You can see it did dip down to 13 days in August during that kind of summer peak season. Beginning of, or end of, middle to end of 2023, it was up to 15. So that is down overall. So things are moving very quickly. And if we look at the average, that jumps up to about 22, 21. The summer months did dip down a little bit. But in general, pretty consistent with the other towns that we're looking at. Now let's look and see what are the prices actually occurring here in Montclair. So we'll start out here with median price. And right off the bat, we're clearing all the other towns, even the ones that we're looking at average. 1.26 million for median price point in Montclair. And you can see since January, and let's go one more, there's January. 1.1, so very big market growth there, over $100,000 of appreciation in that time frame. And a very consistent trend line upwards. If we switch over to average, let's see where that is. 1,285 in terms of overall price in November at the end of November for the trailing 12 months. We saw a bit of an uptick in the spring data, and then things kind of fell in May, but then kept going. And again, that could just be inconsistency. When you're looking at one town, the sample size is so small that those anomalies can affect the data, and you see like little jogs in those things. But in general, very consistent line, finishing off the year, well, the year as we're calling it here, $1.285 million. So let's switch over and look at the sale to list price ratio, how that was affecting bidding, and so on. So you can see here, 2023 in the summer was actually kind of a low period, but ever since it's been jogging upwards, so about a year ago, we're at 120% of list price, and then a little bit of a trend line upwards, closing out at 120.3. Apologies, that was in January I rounded up. So 119, and then finishing out at 120.3. So that is, that's the median. If we look at average, it's probably gonna be even higher. Look at this. It peaked in August at 123.5, and dipped a little bit, and then finished out with November at 123.3. And again, that's following that same trend from July of last year. Very consistent number. Now you'll notice this is much higher than any of the other towns that we've talked about, and that tends to be that strategic pricing that I'm always talking about. It kind of got its root in Montclair. You can see here, if we go back, let's go back like 10 years. You can see here, it was pretty consistent until about 2020, and this number here is, yes, it is during the pandemic, people were rushing to get into great towns, and they wanted to find really good homes in these cool areas that are close to New York City, but there's something definitely going on here where agents were more strategically pricing homes, knowing that full well they were going to go a lot higher, and then the trend just kind of got worse and worse. But part of this is the popularity of the town, of course, but like I said, part of it is that strategic pricing, and you can see here, maybe it wasn't happening as much in 2020, 2018, so to speak, but very, very sharp rise here, and something is very different. So anytime we're looking at Montclair, and I have clients making bids, we have to take that into account in terms of the data and see what the comparables really, what they listed at, but also what they closed at, and are those apples to apples with the new properties that we're seeing. Also, bear in mind, this is November. There's gonna be other homes that have been sold or in contract between now and, you know, it's gonna be January soon, so we have to assume there might be a little bit of appreciation in some of those numbers because these November transactions took place in September, so we always have to factor that in. I know I probably sound like a broken record on that if you've watched any of my other videos, but keep that in mind because that is something we should factor into any potential bids. Let's finish it out with the months of supply in terms of, here we go. We're down to 1.1, which is close to the lowest one. We saw, I think it was, New Providence had .9 months of supply, so we're at 1.1, and that was the low there, and April kind of rounding it out to 1.3, which is pretty consistent with most of the other towns that we've been talking about for the past couple days, and you can see again that, well, this is going back 10 years. Let's just show that at three years. It doesn't look as dramatic, but you can see that slope down since supply has been restricting or contracting since March of 2022 all the way down, and then just kind of flatlining here. This is really the bare minimum. You could get into like a half month, I guess, but that would be a very, very quick absorption rate, I guess you could say. So that's Montclair. I hope there's some interesting nuances there to the sale-to-risk price ratio you should keep in mind. If you have any questions about Montclair, definitely reach out to us. We'd love to help. Now, if you're interested in any one of the towns that we'll be talking about, there's videos throughout the channel that you can watch. Don't forget to comment which town is gonna be next, and also don't forget to register. Click the link over, well, over here to register for the buyer webinar, and that's gonna be January 12th. I'm really looking forward to seeing you. Once again, my name's Jeff Massey. Thank you for letting me into your home tonight, and I hope that together, we can help find your next one. In the meantime, we'll see you in the next video. ♪ Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey ♪