RE: Real Estate Podcast

Clint C. Galliano (00:03)
All right. Welcome to the RRE Real Estate Podcast. ⁓ Just wanted to let you all know that we've completed recording our full buyer series and we've completed recording our full seller series, even though we haven't released all the episodes. And now we're starting to complete our plan of ⁓ releasing regular market updates.

And today we're going to tackle Lafourche Parish and talk about what went on real estate wise in the month of April. What do you think about that, Ben?

Ben Harang (00:43)
Sounds interesting Clint, how you doing today?

Clint C. Galliano (00:46)
I'm doing wonderful, Ben. How you doing?

Ben Harang (00:49)
Good, I'm doing terrific. ⁓ Market update. We talk to people all the time. They want to know how the market is doing. ⁓ they are surprised when I say it's surprisingly well. ⁓ There's some.

some conditions on that, but we're actually closing more property this year than we were last year at this time. ⁓ So Clint has some pretty charts and stuff when he shares his screen and we'll kind of go down the list and talk about the month over month changes. He has some charts and graphs that are pretty interesting.

that shows if a house is priced right when we list it, we sell it. So let's get started, Clint.

Clint C. Galliano (01:43)
All right, let me get my screen shared here. It may take me a couple of seconds. Yeah, we'll see how this works out. You can let us know whether you like it or not.

Ben Harang (01:46)
See how this technology is going to work.

Yeah, and I'm focused on the camera. I'm sitting here looking at a camera lens, but when Clint pulls his charts up, I'm gonna have to look away and kind of follow on a chart. So I'll be back and forth.

Looks like something's coming up,

Alright, that was the first one.

Clint C. Galliano (02:20)
All right, so like Ben said, we're looking at data for the month of April in Lafourche Parish. So first chart we're looking at, first off, we're getting all of this data from RPR, which is the Realtors Property Resource. It's a tool that we have ⁓ to give us information like this. So for market trends, we're... ⁓

We're sitting at a balanced market for Lafourche Parish, but it's trending towards a buyer's market.

Ben Harang (02:56)
in it that

that light that light blue area in between where that that triangle points to a balanced market. It does tend to a buyer's market, but that's kind of kind of where we like to see that a buyer's market. The market gets too slow. And the sellers market. ⁓ Things are happening too fast. So if we in that that light blue area of

the balanced market and a balanced market basically means a six months worth of inventory based on how many houses we close this month, we have six more months of those in the current inventory and that changes over time. But that's what we refer to as a balanced market.

Clint C. Galliano (03:43)
And inventory is how many properties are for sale. And so the key details that this points out is that there's 6.24 months of inventory, which is up 1.63 % month over month. So there's a little bit more inventory than there was in March.

The sold to list price is 98.8%, which is up 3.4 % month over month. And like Ben said, when we were looking over this prior to recording, that means that a lot of the properties that were priced right, sold.

Ben Harang (04:29)
Right. If you price your property correctly, the market is going to buy it. ⁓ It's not what you think it's worth. It's what the market says it's worth. So we've already talked, did a whole episode on pricing. So I just wanted to make that point that it actually works. You price it right, the house sells.

Clint C. Galliano (04:51)
And maybe we did too.

Ben Harang (04:53)
Yeah, I think we did. I think we did. ⁓

Clint C. Galliano (04:58)
So median days in RPR, so that's days that they were tracking the data, is 59. And that's based on properties that closed in April. From the day they were listed to the day they closed, it was about 59 days. So that's two months.

Ben Harang (05:17)
And that's quick.

Two months is from the time of the market, the property hits the market to close, which means a typical pending is 30 to, um,

somewhere between 30 and 60 days depending on the type of loan or financing. So this means that we have somewhere in 15-ish days to get the house under contract from when we listed and the rest of the time is spent pending going through the appraisal inspections and repair process. So that's pretty quick.

Clint C. Galliano (05:54)
Yeah, that's another indicator that the homes that sold in April were priced properly.

Ben Harang (06:01)
So if you price your house properly, what this means is be prepared to have another place to live in 60 days. So if you put it like that, 60 days is not a long time to figure out the next step in life.

Clint C. Galliano (06:18)
And the median sold price is $231,130. And that's up 12.75 % month over month. So that means that the median sold price is a little higher than it was in March. So that actually brings up something we wanted to talk about is the difference between median and average. So average is the...

Ben Harang (06:42)
immediate

Clint C. Galliano (06:48)
Basically, sum up all of the sold prices and divide it by the number of properties in that group, and that gives you the average price. That's not really indicative of what's actually going on because you could have a $75,000 property or a bunch of $75,000 properties and one $500,000 properties, and it can average out to $230,000.

the median price is an actual price that something sold for in the middle of that group of homes that sold. And so that's what the median sold price is.

Ben Harang (07:29)
The median is if if we have a hundred houses There's a hundred and one houses. There's fifty that's sold for less and fifty that's sold for more so it's a better indication of the pricing rather than just a ⁓ straight average price anyway, that's just a Something to keep in mind when we go through these statistics that it's the median price not the average price so Let's move on Clinton

Clint C. Galliano (07:55)
Correct.

All right. ⁓

Let's see, move on to estimated property value. So another thing that we use this RPR tool for is to value properties, give us an idea of what the property value should be. That's one of the tools we talked about in one of the episodes on pricing on how we arrive at a value. This gives us a of a gut check.

⁓ in addition to doing our comparative market analysis to arrive on what we think we should list a property at. And so that's what this is based on. So the median estimated value for properties is $230,000 for the month of April in LaFouche. And that's properties that are active listings.

Ben Harang (08:56)
And you can.

Clint C. Galliano (08:57)
And that's

showing that over the last 12 months, that's up almost a whole percent. ⁓ And then for those of you that are watching us, whether on YouTube or Spotify, ⁓ showing that the blue line is Lafourche Parish data, the orange line is Louisiana data, and both of those are generally trend the same. And then the

yellow line is the U.S. and we're kind of a good bit below that and part of that is is because our housing prices are a lot less than the average national housing price so but it's just some interesting stuff to look at.

Ben Harang (09:41)
All right.

And you can, at this chart especially, you can see we generally track as well as we generally track Louisiana, but not as high. So if you look at basically September of 2010,

Uh, if you've been around a while, you know, you know what happened in September of 2010. There was something called the BP oil spill that crashed the real estate market locally. Um, cause we didn't know if anything was going to get cleaned up and what the contamination was and, and all those things. But as generally happens, it worst case scenario doesn't happen and people are resilient and we came back.

And we kind of tracked Louisiana pricing for a while after the spill. And then in 16, there was a flood from Lafayette to Baton Rouge. And then in August of 21, you see a little dip there. And you don't have to be around here for very long to remember Hurricane Ida.

So the real estate market tracks the environmental and catastrophic events that happen. So they generally go down and once people recover, the real estate market recovers and continues. just something to look at, just an interesting observation.

Clint C. Galliano (11:27)
even though it's not showing Lafourche Parish data prior to February of 2016, it's really prominent in the Louisiana estimated property values that in from just after April, actually you could say because that's just a straight slope so that tells me that that's a

Change from that's a reporting data. So that's but the difference between data points so that's not that they've got data points in between that's a average price was at one point and They didn't get another data point until the next one. So that's why you've got that slope down But pretty much it dropped right after the BP oil spill and stayed down until almost middle of July of 11

Ben Harang (12:14)
Mm-hmm.

It stayed down about a year.

Clint C. Galliano (12:23)
Yeah, a little bit over a year. ⁓ but yeah, that was reflected back then. ⁓ So just a little clarity on that chart. All right, moving on. New listings. All right, so these are listings that were taken in the month of April.

Ben Harang (12:38)
Yeah. All right. Moving on. All right.

Clint C. Galliano (12:48)
The median list price was $219,950. For all intents and purposes, $220,000. That's up 1 % month over month. There were 102 new listings taken. That's down 16.4 % month over month.

The median price per square foot was $139 per square foot. That's up 0.7 % month over month. The total volume of new listings was $27,778,519. That's down 5.6 % month over month.

and median living area was 1663 square feet. That's down 2.6%. So if you're watching on video, you can see this chart kind of bounces up and down. There's no consistent trend, but that kind of reflects the market of who's ready to sell and when they're ready to sell. But it's kind of impressive.

Ben Harang (13:56)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano (14:04)
27 million, almost $28 million worth of property was listed in the month of April.

Ben Harang (14:12)
And again, if you want to sell your property and you price it for the market value, you're going to sell your property. Overpriced listings are not selling. So if you want to sell it, price it right.

Clint C. Galliano (14:30)
And the other thing to remember is that this is just Lafourche Parish. So it's not a specific area in Lafourche. It's the whole parish. So from Thibaut to Fouchon.

Ben Harang (14:34)
Right.

And Clint and I talked before we started recording the podcast about ⁓ the challenges that South Lafourche has between ⁓ interest rate that everybody's dealing with and the cost of homeowners insurance and flood insurance. ⁓ those two things have negatively impacted.

the market in South Lafourche and Fouchon all the way down into Grand Isle.

Clint C. Galliano (15:18)
And when your average homeowner's insurance, well, say average, I guess it's not really average, but it's a two-story home that's 2,800 square feet. And the insurance quotes that I'm getting on it for just to share with prospective buyers is over $8,000. That makes it a tough pill to swallow.

Ben Harang (15:43)
Right, talking about $700 a month just for the insurance.

Clint C. Galliano (15:46)
him. All right, active listings. So this is total active listings in the month of April. The average, I'm sorry, median list price, because I keep wanting to say average. Median list price was $230,000. That's up 2.2 % month over month. Number of properties is 382. That's how many properties total were listed are on the market in April.

Ben Harang (15:48)
⁓ So.

Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano (16:16)
and that was up 1.6 % month over month. The median days in RPR, so that's everything that was active, was 84 days. Median price per square foot was $132. That's up 2.3 % month over month. Total volume was $107,067,661, and that's up 5.7 % month over month.

And the median living area square footage was 1,819 square foot and that's up 1.1%. And again, looking at the chart, if you're watching the video, this only goes back to April of 2020, but our listings were kind of low, which everybody knew that. That was in the middle of the pandemic and then...

while we're on the kind of backside of the pandemic or starting to get on the backside, we had Hurricane Ida hit and our inventory was really low. And then as we get into the, towards the middle of 2022, we had inventory shoot up and it's a little below that peak post Ida, but for the most part, it's kind of steady at a steady pace.

Ben Harang (17:42)
Yeah,

it's maintaining. So we're kind of maintaining, we're staying in that balanced market range, kind of leaning towards a buyer's market, but not a whole lot. There's still a demand for properly priced houses. Did I hit on the price enough, Clint? You think I should say it some more about pricing it properly?

Clint C. Galliano (18:06)
Wait, Ben, you think we need to talk about price?

Ben Harang (18:09)
⁓ i think that might be a an important concept you want to sell your house price it properly all right enough of that foolishness

Clint C. Galliano (18:20)
Yeah,

all right, new pending listings. So these are new listings that were put under contract or newly pending, I should say. So this is stuff that was put under contract in the month of April. Median list price was 221607. That's down 2.6 % month over month. There were 66 properties that were put under contract in April. That is down.

23.3, so almost 25 % down from March.

Ben Harang (18:55)
And when Clint's talking about put under contract, what he means, just to clarify, is the house has a purchase agreement on it. Didn't close, but somebody's agreed to buy it and the seller's agreed to sell it. And now we're going through the process to get to the closing table. So that's what we mean by how many properties are pending, they're pending the sale.

Clint C. Galliano (19:18)
Right, and these numbers in particular were somebody wrote a purchase agreement and put them under contract in the month of April. ⁓ Median days in RPR was 45, so that means that they were put under contract in roughly 45 days. Or have been under, well, from when they were listed.

Ben Harang (19:28)
Right.

Clint C. Galliano (19:43)
as of the time of the end of April had been 45 days from they were listed. So, which is about poor because they haven't closed yet. That number on face value seems low because we're used to looking at days on market, taking into account days to when it closes, but this is for it getting under contract. So that kind of bolsters what we talking about earlier.

Ben Harang (19:52)
Right.

Right.

Clint C. Galliano (20:12)
for how long it takes from getting under contract to getting close. The median dollars per square foot for what went under contract in April was $141. That's down 2.1 % month over month. The total volume that was put under contract is $16,085,264.

Ben Harang (20:17)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano (20:38)
So that's down 28.7 % month over month. So it was actually kind of slow. But that kind of tracks with the number of properties that were put under contract also.

Ben Harang (20:45)
Well, it was slower than March.

Right. Right.

Clint C. Galliano (20:53)
And median living area square footage was up a little bit, 6.1 % month over month at 1,717 square feet. And the chart.

Ben Harang (21:05)
Yeah. So

that in my mind, that's a typical real estate market chart and ⁓ price list with the properties. If we maintain that, ⁓ we will have fewer peaks and valleys. But at the end of the year, that's pretty much what an average month would look like.

Clint C. Galliano (21:25)
And this is median list price data since April of 2020. But you're not going to see things smooth out like that. It kind of goes up and down based on what's coming on the market and what gets sold off. All right.

Ben Harang (21:40)
Mm-hmm.

Clint C. Galliano (21:46)
This next chart reflects total pending listings in the month of April. So the newly written contracts in addition to stuff that was under contract or has a purchase agreement on it prior to the month of April.

median list price on that is $223,590 and that is down 1.5 % month over month. Number of properties is 114, that's down 3.4 % month over month. Median days in RPR is 28 days and that's down 45%, 45.1 % to be exact.

month over month and that's a short time. What that tells me is that whatever was written in March must have been at the end of March to have this short of medium days or a good bit of it anyways. Median dollars per square foot is $145 and that's down 1.4 % month over month.

Ben Harang (22:31)
That's very short.

Clint C. Galliano (22:57)
The total volume for what's pending on listings is $28,872,654. That's down 6.4 % month over month. And median living area across all the pending listings is 1,672 square foot, and that's up 3.3 % month over month.

Ben Harang (23:22)
And Clint and I were looking at this chart. ⁓ If you look at IDA between July and December of 21, it was, we were on the rise. IDA knocked it down a little bit, but we have recovered from IDA ⁓ four years ago, three and a half years ago. ⁓

And people always concerned about where's the bottom, where's the top? Ida was not the bottom. Earlier in 21 and later in 20 was actually the bottom. So it was rising in July of 21 and then Ida came and knocked it back. And then we recovered since and we still above where we were for Ida. ⁓ So the...

The real estate market is still healthy.

Clint C. Galliano (24:19)
Yes, indeed.

Alright, number of sold listings in April. So median sold price was $231,130. That's up 12.7 % month over month. There were 64 properties sold and that's up 25.5 % month over month. Sounds like March was a little bit of a slow month for sales, closed sales.

The sold to list price ratio is 98.84%. No, we're not gonna let Ben say it again. We're gonna say it a different way. That means that the buyers only got about a 0.16 % premium on the list price of what was sold. How's that?

Ben Harang (24:54)
Can I say it again, Clint?

That it means you price it right.

Clint C. Galliano (25:14)
Yeah.

A better way to say it is what I said was that the buyers were okay with only getting a 0.16 % premium.

Ben Harang (25:29)
And

the market decides that. The buyers don't decide it. The sellers don't decide it. The market decides it because that's where the willing buyers and willing sellers meet.

Clint C. Galliano (25:32)
are 1.16.

correct.

Ben Harang (25:41)
So

it's our job to interpret the market, not listen to what people say.

Clint C. Galliano (25:49)
So median days in RPR, and we actually talked about this on our first chart, was 59 days. So from when it was listed to when it was closed, the median days was 59 days.

Ben Harang (26:02)
Pack your eggs and be ready to move out if you price it right.

Clint C. Galliano (26:07)
and that was actually down almost 12 % month over month. Median square footage, dollars per square foot, 148, and that's up 10.4 % month over month. And total volume sold was $16,054,919, and that was up 51.1 % month over month.

Ben Harang (26:29)
So what this tells me is March was an active month where property came on the market that closed in April. So a lot of things that was listed in March closed in April. So you're talking no more than 60 days, as you're 59 days, but some of them could have been listed at the middle or end of March and closed beginning to middle of April. So some of them were sitting there at 30 days.

And again, this is median, which means as many below 59 as there are above 59 days.

Clint C. Galliano (27:05)
Yes, indeed. All right. And finally, month supply of inventory. And this is data back to April of 2020 again. ⁓ This is represented as a chart if you're watching the video. We've got 6.24 months of inventory. And like Ben said at the beginning, that means that at the current rate that we're

We have homes closing. It would take 6.24 months to sell everything that's listed on the market active today. ⁓ That's about a...

Ben Harang (27:40)
which does not take

into account anything that continues to be, that continues to come onto the market. That's just a snapshot in time. ⁓ So if we had no more new listings in six months, we'd have nothing to sell.

Clint C. Galliano (27:58)
So that 6.24 month supply of inventory is up 1.6 months over last month. ⁓ Over the last 12 months, it's down 2.0%. But the chart gives us ⁓ kind of a recommendation. We've got a bump last year between June and November in inventory, a little bit more inventory, and then it's kind of settled down.

Ben Harang (28:13)
Yeah.

Clint C. Galliano (28:27)
Since November of 24, the listings seem to be fairly steady. They've settled in right above six months of inventory. We had kind of bumped up to about seven in June of 24. Then it came back down and we've been staying just above six months of inventory in Lafourche Parish.

Ben Harang (28:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and that's parish wide. If you get into pockets of Lafourche like we talked about before, it's going to be less of a balanced market for the months of inventory will be probably something less than 6 % six months on supply inventory.

So as you get to central and north Lafourche, it becomes less of a buyer's market and more of a, not a seller's market, but things are just moving faster.

Clint C. Galliano (29:30)
Yeah, because we and I would venture to say that a good bit of the inventory that we're showing in ⁓ Lafourche Parish is actually in North Lafourche. While we're getting some in South Lafourche and Central Lafourche, the majority between new construction. Actually, I'd say the majority of North Lafourche is new construction. And while we've got some resale. ⁓

That's probably the majority of the inventory for the parish.

Ben Harang (30:02)
Yeah, because the new construction is still going on in North Lafourche. And I'm not aware of a whole lot that's going on in Central Lafourche. I'm not aware of any that's going on in South Lafourche. It's just an unfortunate state of affairs. And that's all driven by the price of insurance. It's not that people don't want to live in South Lafourche. People want to live in South Lafourche. They can't afford to pay the insurance premiums.

Clint C. Galliano (30:33)
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to pay it.

Ben Harang (30:36)
or buy it and not pay the insurance premium, which is some people are actually doing, which is a little scary.

All right, is that it?

Clint C. Galliano (30:46)
All right, so

that is all of the charts that we have. ⁓ If you like this, let us know. We're going to start doing this on a regular basis ⁓ and try and release this market updates outside of our normally scheduled releases. ⁓

We're also going to do one for Terrebonne Parish. So that way we're not ignoring one for the other because we want to be fair for the markets we operate in. And if we've got some interest for the other parishes that we operate in, let us know and we'll put together something on that also. ⁓ We're going to get this out. We also want to release these market updates probably once a month on a timely basis. So it'll be.

somewhat fairly quickly after the first of the month. ⁓ And we hope you enjoy it. Hope you get some good information out of it. If you got any questions, feel free to like, subscribe, comment, share, and go to rerealestatepodcast.com and ask a question. There's a link right up there at the top.

and it opens up a form and you can fill out your question and it comes straight to us and we'll answer it on the podcast. What do you think about that, Ben?

Ben Harang (32:14)
All right.

I think that's a great idea, Clint. I don't know where they came from, but something you probably did.

The numbers can get boring, but at the end of the day, once we go through them, what this tells me is that the real estate market in Lafourche Parish is healthy. ⁓ In pockets, it's healthier than it is in other pockets, but overall it's healthy. you price your house right, ⁓ according to the market price, it'll sell and there'll be a buyer for it.

So don't get scared to sell your house It's just a matter how much we can get for it and if that number is enough for you to move on with your life so Other than that, I think we we've done with Lafourche Clint

Clint C. Galliano (33:09)
We're not done with them, but we're done with talking about the market update for this month.

Ben Harang (33:10)
We're not done.

Yeah,

the market update for Lafourche Parish is finished. How about that? That's a little better way to say it. All right. Y'all have a great day. Thank you.

Clint C. Galliano (33:18)
that works.

See you, Ben.