Total properties changing hands may have been down ever so slightly – declining a single transaction from 694 to 693 – but prices were up enough in Fairfax County’s real-estate market in February for a nearly 16-percent increase in total sales volume.
That’s according to figures reported March 12 by Bright MLS, based on data from MarketStats by ShowingTime, which reported that the average sales price of the 693 properties that went to closing countywide in February was $835,322, up 16.4 percent from a year before.
And the increase would have been more, barring a decline in the number of single-family transactions in the overall sales mix. (Single-family homes represented 44.9% of all transactions this February compared to 46.4% a year before.)
Among the three segments of the market:
• The average sales price of single-family homes stood at $1,206,759, up 23.3 percent from $979,043 a year before.
• The average sales price of attached homes (townhouses, rowhouses and condominiums) was up 8.9 percent to $534,866.
• The average sales price of condominiums only was up 10 percent to $408,266.
A total of 140 properties went to closing for $1 million or more, including 17 in excess of $2.5 million in two for more than $5 million.
Add up the sales and prices, and total market volume for February stood at $574.8 million, up from $496.1 million a year before.
Properties that went to closing in February spent 21 days between listing and ratified sales contract, an improvement from the 31 days required a year before, and garnered 101 percent of listing price, up from 99.1 percent.
The lack of inventory, which has been a problem locally and nationally for the past 18 months, is beginning to ease a bit. The 788 properties on the Fairfax County market at the end of February represented a slight decline from the 799 available a year before, and the number of properties coming to market during the month stood 5.2 percent higher than a year before.
There may be a rough patch to work through: The number of pending sales in the Fairfax County pipeline (826) at the end of the month was down almost 15 percent from a year before. Those pendings tend to become final sales within a month or two.
Figures represent most, but not all, sales on the market. All February 2024 figures are preliminary and are subject to revision.
