Part One of at least Two …

I look at too much data. I admit it. In this post, I’m posing just a question – when looking at the past ten years of real estate data** in the Charlottesville, Virginia area, what is a “normal” level of real estate transactions and is there a correlation between transactions and population growth? And how can my buyer and seller clients (and readers) apply this knowledge?

My hypothesis is that once we achieve a stable, consistent volume of real estate transactions – equilibrium if you will – we’ll be able to definitively say that we reached “bottom” or “stagnation” and start to consider such things as “appreciation of real estate values.”

Normalcy:

The State or fact of being normal.

Normal:

2 b : conforming to a type, standard, or regular pattern

“Normal” number of real estate transactions year over year? Stable locations of where people buy?*

Now we look at the number of single family home transactions in the Charlottesville MSA: (I know this screws up the formatting in my blog, but I would rather post a big, useful chart and sacrifice the formatting.

Now we look at the number of attached home transactions in the Charlottesville MSA:

Note that Greene County’s attached home inventory doesn’t even register; that is likely to change.

* Human Settlement patterns are changing.

– Mapping Virginia’s Human Settlement Patterns

“Mapping America: Every City, Every Block,” breaks down the nation into Census tracts and displays the population with a dot for every 1,000 people in the map scale seen to the left. (As a cool aside, the dots are color coded by race, making it possible to get a sense of how segregated or integrated different communities are.)

– Human Settlement Patterns: The Fringes Unravel

– Functional human settlement patterns