April Showers Bring Spring Flowers – Little rain so far, although as usual… both the temperature and the market appear to be heating up a bit, let’s hope this trend continues. As we move through spring season towards summer, historically the amount of new listings drop considerably, and sales pick up, washing out high inventory levels and causing the market to level off. As the market has gained momentum over the past two years, we‘ve continued to see higher seasonal inventory levels, and this year buyer demand just hasn’t been there to out-pace inventory. Hopefully over the next six to eight weeks we will see a heavy demand leveling out the market.
In particularly the $750K-$1M price segment which is normally selling like hot-cakes in high season, has been very slow in both Palm Desert & Rancho Mirage. The $1M-$1.5M price segment valley-wide which was slow in 2013 and 2014 has picked up dramatically with sellers tired of waiting for the market to improve, and lowering their prices consistent with what the buyer market would deliver causing good momentum. The high-end market $2M and up has been very slow with the best sales numbers in La Quinta. I attribute increased sales numbers in La Quinta to more NEW high-end development in Tradition, Hideaway and Madison. Second in line in Indian Wells is Toscana CC with BIG new home sales & re-sales.
Out of the four desert cities of my expertise; Rancho Mirage-RM, Palm Desert-PD, Indian Wells-IW and La Quinta-LQ; Usually LQ out-performs the other three cities in sales. Over the past two weeks – RM has made a big jump and out-performed the other three Cities with 45 In-Escrow, LQ right behind RM with 35 In–Escrow, PD with 24 In-Escrow, and the smallest City of the three IW with 23 In–Escrow… great numbers for Indian Wells.
As for SOLD/Closed Escrows, please click here to view each cities sales statistics.