This year’s housing resale market in metro Milwaukee and Madison is “going like gangbusters,” with January sales 13.2 percent and 19 percent higher, respectively, than a year earlier, said real estate analyst John Englehardt.
“It looks like January will be an all-time record” in monthly sales for Wisconsin’s top two metropolitan areas, said Englehardt, research director at Wisconsin Realtors Association.
Interest rates around 7 percent, high consumer confidence and gentler than usual weather were probably responsible for January’s localized sales boom, Englehardt theorized.
“That and the fact that people were more into the Packers’ ’97 Super Bowl, when it was more new and no one was going to open houses, than this year,” he said.
Metro Milwaukee which includes Milwaukee, Waukesha, Ozaukee and Washington Counties had 779 housing resales in January, up from 688 in January 1996, Metro Multiple Listing Service in Wauwatosa reported.
Madison’s Dane County had 187, up from 157, South Central Multiple Listing Service in Madison reported.
Those gains were countered by lackluster performance in the state’s southern beltline counties and northern reaches, Englehardt said. Their flat sales likely will leave Wisconsin below the 10.3 percent national sales gain in January, reported by the National Association of Realtors.
His organization only analyzes state sales data quarterly but Englehardt said, from the statistics he’s seen, “You can almost draw a snowline as you creep above the Waukesha area and start to get into sales similar to last year.
“Dane County and the Milwaukee area are up, but Kenosha’s down and that part of the state is dragging. Brown, Outagamie, St. Croix Counties virtually the same as last year,” the researcher said.
Sue Hermes, president of the Metropolitan Association of Realtors of Milwaukee and Waukesha Counties happily reported that, “Everybody’s busy, especially in Waukesha County. It’s been wild, the way business is going.”
Waukesha County was up a stunning 23.3 percent, in fact. Milwaukee County’s western neighbor had 222 January resales, up from 180 a year earlier.
Milwaukee County had 450 January resales, up from 423; Washington County had 69, up from 40. Ozaukee had 38, down from 45.
Hermes attributed the busy month to “the nice weather, interest rates are good, Alan Greenspan hasn’t done anything terrible and a lot of transferees.”
Last year’s browsers are likely this year’s buyers, she said.
“They were told interest rates were going down, but they were looking and waiting. Now they don’t want to take the chance of them going up,” said Hermes, who is associate manager of Prudential Preferred Properties in Delafield.
All segments of the housing market are moving, even the long desultory high end, Hermes said.
