State's home sales up 8% from January '16

Information about residential units sold in January in selected housing markets in Arkansas.
Information about residential units sold in January in selected housing markets in Arkansas.

Arkansas home sales rose almost 8 percent in January compared with January 2016, the Arkansas Realtors Association said Wednesday.

There were 1,943 homes sold in January in the 43-county area surveyed by the Realtors Association, up from about 1,800 in January last year.

Benton County real estate agents sold 336 homes in January, a 2 percent increase over January 2016. Sales in Washington County rose 15 percent to 205.

Pulaski County's sales were down 14 percent compared with January 2016. There were 276 homes sold in Pulaski County, the Realtors Association said.

The 14 percent fall in sales in Pulaski County was the weakest of the big counties in the state, said Kathy Deck, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

"By and large, we saw, I would say, a leveling off from last year to this year," Deck said. "In other words, the increases weren't as large as they were last year in the biggest places as we were used to seeing. That's perhaps not surprising given that we're this far into the recovery and the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in December."

January home sales historically are low, accounting for only about 5 percent of the total for a year. The 14 percent drop for Pulaski County isn't a concern, said Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

"There is room for a lot of statistical noise in there," Pakko said. "I wouldn't be too worried about any one month's observation."

Karl Freeman, principal broker for Keller Williams Realty in Little Rock, was surprised that the sales total for Pulaski County was down so much.

"We were actually up [in home sales] in January," Freeman said of his agency.

Even though January sales typically are low, the month has been a good indicator for the past five or six years of how well the rest of the year will be, Pakko said.

"So I guess that it's a good thing that we're up over last year [in January]," Pakko said.

A decline of 14 percent for Pulaski County is surprising, said Scott McElmurry, chief executive officer of Bank of Little Rock Mortgage.

"We didn't see that in our business [in January] for Pulaski County," McElmurry said.

The real estate market in Northwest Arkansas is as hot as it can be, Deck said.

"There is a lot of construction and a lot of value being put on the ground," Deck said. "But we also saw absorption [of new homes] happen very quickly."

Building permits in Benton and Washington counties skyrocketed last year, Deck said.

"I was concerned in the first half of the year that building permits would outstrip our demand and that we would see some buildup in our inventory [of homes] that happened in the recession," Deck said. "But that didn't happen at all. We saw the number of houses that became occupied match very closely with the number of houses that were built."

Business on 03/09/2017

Upcoming Events