Report: White Plains home sales, prices decline

The overall inventory of single-family houses, 2- to 4-family houses, condos and co-ops listed for sale in Westchester was sharply down from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2019, according to data released by Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

Fourth-quarter listing inventory fell from the third quarter, with 2,811 properties on the market as compared with the 4,104 that had been available. In the fourth quarter of 2018, there had been 2,988 properties listed for sale.

The average sale price for the residential categories covered in the report showed a drop to $616,053 in the fourth quarter of 2019 compared with the third quarter”™s average price of $718,846. The fourth quarter 2019 average sale price was 4.8% higher than the $587,956 recorded for the fourth quarter of 2018.

The single-family, condominium and co-op market segments showed pricing softness while the 2- to 4-family segment showed strength, with quarter-to-quarter average sale pricing up from $548,072 to $580,789. A comparison of the fourth quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of 2018, when the average sale price was $522,896, showed an increase of 11.1%.

Co-ops in Westchester lost 8.2% in their average sales price from $212,421 in the third quarter of 2019 to $194,912 in the fourth quarter. That was 0.2% under the $195,240 recorded in the fourth quarter of 2018.

The average sale price on condos dropped. It had been $467,396 for the third quarter of 2019 and went down 3.1% to $452,845 for the fourth quarter. The decline from the fourth quarter of 2018, when it stood at $458,102, was 1.1%.

The average sale price for single-family houses in Westchester fell 12.2%. It had been $906,407 in the third quarter and dropped to $796,109 in the fourth quarter. The fourth-quarter figure was 2.3% higher than the $777,894 average price in the fourth quarter of 2018.

At the luxury end of the single-family market, there was a 2.5% increase in the 2019 fourth-quarter average sale price of $2,291,679 from the $2,235,888 it had been in 2018. However, that represented an 8.7% drop from the $2,509,475 average sale price for the third quarter of 2019.

The number of sales closed for properties in all of the categories covered in the report during the fourth quarter in Westchester was off by 21.3% from the third quarter, though it was almost even with what happened in the fourth quarter of 2018. In the third quarter of 2019, 2,987 properties changed hands. In the fourth quarter, the figure was 2,350. It had been 2,348 in the fourth quarter of 2018.

The White Plains area was hit by a drop in the number of single-family house closings in the fourth quarter of 2019 compared with the third quarter. The drop was 50.3%, down from 326 to 162. The fourth-quarter 2019 activity was 7.4% below what happened in the fourth quarter of 2018 when there were 175 closings. The fourth-quarter 2019 average sale price for single-family homes in White Plains fell 11.9% from the third-quarter average price and was 9.5% below what was recorded for the fourth quarter of 2018. Those numbers were $1,268,530, $1,439,434 and $1,401,449, respectively.

In Putnam County, the average sale price for the fourth quarter of 2019 was $373,900, down 5.5% from the third quarter”™s $395,589 and a 5.1% drop from the $394,025 shown for the fourth quarter of 2018. The number of sales closed in the fourth quarter of 2019 was down 13.3% at 307, compared with 354 in the third quarter. In the fourth quarter of 2018 there had been 309 sales closed.

In Dutchess County, while the average price was off 1% at $324,973 in the fourth quarter compared with $328,184 in the third quarter of 2019, it was up 0.4% from $323,575 in the fourth quarter of 2018. The number of sales closed was down 14.3% from the third quarter”™s 489 closings and stood at 419. That represented an increase from the 359 closings that took place in the fourth quarter of 2018.