THE SURGE IN REAL ESTATE SALES AS A RESULT OF THE PANDEMIC IS REAL. I call it the pandemic push.
Let's start with a quick rewind to the lockdown of March/April. Uncertainty paralyzed most buying & selling activity. I summarized the state of affairs as, ‘intentions remain intact but action had stagnated’. Nobody knew when that would change. I certainly didn’t. But it happened sometime in early May. The surge in sales was noticeable by end of June. But would it persist?...it certainly has.
In April, 41 properties went under contract. Then the surge began. In May, 114 properties. In June, 179. July: 220. August: 206, September: 186. Thus far in October, 104.
I don’t know anyone who predicted it. And if someone were to tell me they did, I would tell them they’re full of crap.
Like most things in my rearview mirror, I can clearly see what has been and what is transpiring. The reasons for the Pandemic Push is a combination of the following: those who had been planning to buy a mountain home stopped procrastinating; those who were merely dreaming of it took action, and those who hadn’t thought of it before were enabled by the mass corporate/cultural shift to working at home.
We, the local real estate industry, do not have a collective method to survey the reasons why people buy homes in Eagle County. Thus, I cannot say with certainty that X percent of the sales were due specifically to the pandemic effect/mindset. But if I had to guess, I would say about one-third of the sales this summer would not have occurred without the pandemic. That is a result of my personal business experiences and many anecdotes from around town.
Although reasons are a shade of grey, the data is black & white. It is easy to notice four areas in the Vail Valley which have surged way beyond their normal annual sales volume. These areas historically appeal to short-term and part-time resdidents and that type of use has the easy ability to evolve. Notice the spike in volume in the chart below. What you see in 2019 also reflects the long term average in each of those areas. Wow.
