Arkansas home sales climbed 8.7 percent in January - typically a slow month - compared with January last year, the Arkansas Realtors Association said Friday.
There were 1,595 homes sold in the 43-county area that reports to the association, up from 1,467 a year earlier. The sales include existing homes and new home construction.
The January total was the best since January 2007, before the recession began,when more than 1,900 homes were sold, said Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
“January is the slowest month of the year,” Pakko said. “So it’s certainly encouraging to see the strong year-over-year growth for the state.”
Nationally, new-home sales were up 9.6 percent in January, the Commerce Department said. Sales of previously owned homes fell 5.1 percent, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Pulaski County real estate agents sold 259 homes in January to lead the state, followed by Benton County with 256 sales and Washington County with 143.
Only two of the top 10 counties reported declines in January sales - Washington County, which saw a drop of 8.9 percent, and Faulkner County, down about 31 percent.
Both of those counties were coming off “unusually strong” sales totals in January 2013, Pakko said.
“That has an effect on the year-over-year comparison,” Pakko said.
Very few counties in the state registered declines in sales, said Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville.
The biggest drops were Faulkner County, which had 30 fewer sales; and Washington and Boone counties, which each had 14 fewer sales.
Winter weather has been a hindrance for the past few months nationally, said Pat Harris, chief executive officer of Coldwell Banker Harris McHaney Faucette Realtors in Rogers.
But January’s home sales totals for Arkansas probably weren’t affected significantly by the weather, Harris said.
The reason is that closings come 30 to 60 days after an offer is accepted, meaning that closings in January reflect accepted offers of a month or two earlier, Harris said.
He said the real effect of this year’s snow and ice should show in March and April home sales numbers.
The average sales price for a house in the state was $145,423 in January, up about 1 percent from January last year.
“Generally speaking, [Arkansas] is not seeing home price increases as strong as other parts of the country,” Pakko said. “But then again,overall, we didn’t see the declines that the rest of the country did in the recession.”
Deck said that over the past six or eight months, home sales prices in the state have been relatively flat.
“Given that we’re in an economic recovery, and nationally we’re seeing the beginnings of consumers doing better, and the unemployment rate is down, you would hope to see that reflected in the real estate market a little bit more strongly than what we’ve seen here in Arkansas,” Deck said. “I would say that the tepid increases in home prices also reflect our rather tepid labor market in the state.”
Pakko said he expects 2014 to see fairly strong home sales, but not as strong as last year, which was the best year for home sales since 2007.
For the past three years, January has been an indicator of the direction of home sales for the entire year, Pakko said. In 2011 and 2012, January sales were down and home sales finished the year down. Last year, January home sales were up and the year finished up, he said.
“I don’t know if there is any good reason that we would expect January to be an indicator, but at the very least it is a good sign that the momentum from last year is carrying over into the beginning of this year,” Pakko said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/15/2014