Please take a look at my above video. I am John Coley. I am a real estate agent with Lake Martin Voice Realty and this is my 2020 Real Estate Market Report for Lake Martin, Alabama.

Waterfront home sales in March 2020 on Lake Martin still showed strong evidence of being a seller’s market.

I am getting a lot of good questions from people these days about the market. They ask- has the coronavirus craziness affected Lake Martin real estate? Has it caused sellers to panic and drop prices drastically? The short answer is – no. Please see these results from March 2020.

While you review them, please note that since most waterfront home sales take about five or six weeks to close, these sales that closed in March probably were put under contract in late January to mid-February, 2020. I do think we will see closings affected the last half of April and it will follow through to May.

But, while we are observing March, we can see that not only was Lake Martin not affected, its strength as a seller’s market actually increased.

My source for all of these stats is the ACRE – Alabama Center for Real Estate.

Sales – the number of waterfront homes sold on Lake Martin in March were 33. That includes all agents, all brokerages, everyone in the Lake Martin MLS. This number represents a 6.5% increase in sales from the prior year of March 2019.

Inventory – the number of waterfront homes for sale on Lake Martin decreased when compared to the prior year. In March 2020 there were 236 waterfront homes for sale. In March 2019 that number was 289 – which means inventory decreased 18% from last year.

Correspondingly, the months of supply decreased year to year.

I really look hard at the year to year statistics. It takes the seasonality out of comparing month to month. Since Lake Martin is a seasonal market, most of our sales happen March – October. So I pay particular attention, virus or no, to how any current month’s sales and inventory compares to the same month prior year.

That is why I am saying, without a doubt, the sales closed in March 2020 show that buyers and sellers striking deals during late January through February thought that we are still in a seller’s market. No fire sales. No panics.