Six months' results do not a year make, but there's something for both optimists and pessimists in St. John real estate sales for the first six months of the year.
Transactions listed on the RE/MAX Island Paradise Realty Web site show 13 homes changed hands between January and June. If you annualize that number, this is about a 15% increase in units. Land sales show the same kind of extrapolated growth with 10 deals in the first six months compared to about 24 in all of 2009.
(It's only fair to point out that RE/MAX's sales history differs from that of Cruz Bay Realty's. The latter shows one more villa and two more land sales.)
Pricing, however, for both homes and land is soft. The average final asking price for a home in the first half of the year was $1.8 million, while the average selling price was $1.563 million, a decrease of 14.5%. A similar story with land sales; average asking price of $368 thousand and a selling price of $305 thousand, a nearly 17% discount.
The inventory of homes for sale has been steady at about 145 properties, according to the Multiple Listing Service. It's a good bet, however, that some villa owners would like to sell but just don't feel it makes sense to put their house on the market in a, shall we say 'soft' economy.