Cape home sales plummet since 2005; prices sliding
6/2/2006
Written By CAPE COD TIMES

The volume of real estate sales sank more than 20 percent in May when compared with the same month last year, according to the Barnstable County Registry of Deeds.

The median value of property sales dipped nearly 1 percent.

Last month the registry recorded 617 deeds, which was down 21.3 percent when compared with 784 deeds in May 2005. The total value of all May sales was $343.79 million, a 13.5 percent decline when compared with $368.21 million in May 2005.

For the year to date, sales volume is off 20.2 percent and total sales value is down 13.5 percent, according to Register of Deeds John F. Meade's office.

For the first five months of the year, 2,504 properties have been sold, compared with 3,138 in the same period of 2005. And the total value of all properties sold so far this year is $1.28 billion, compared with $1.49 billion for the same period last year.

For the month, individual property sale values wavered a bit.

The median sale price - meaning half the sales were valued at a higher price and the other half were lower - for Cape properties was $365,000 last month. That's down 0.75 percent when compared with a median sale value of $367,750 in May 2005.

Though the pace of Cape property sales has been slowing down over the past year, sale prices have been slow to reflect that change.

The last time the registry noted a decline in prices when comparing sales from the same period in the previous year was in November.

But at that time the county agency was using a different method to track sales. Until January, the registry looked only at average sale values and factored in sales valued between $25,000 and $1 million. At the start of the year, the registry switched to tracking the median sale value for all properties valued at more than $50,000.

In November, the average price - which can be skewed by a few extremely high or low prices - was $386,097, down 3 percent from $398,042 in November 2005.

On a month-to-month basis, sale values have fluctuated more. For instance, the median sale value dipped 4.1 percent when comparing February ($370,000) and March ($354,900) figures.

(Published: June 2, 2006)