This is a brief video summary of the weekly Montana Land Report from Montana Land Source for the week of 11/11/2020. The Montana Land Report summarizes the week's activity in the Montana land market, as well as Montana land news and events, and goes out to over 5,000 recipients. For more information go to https://mtlandsource.com. Please like, share and subscribe.
"34 total property updates:
• two properties back on the market
• nine new listings
• eight pending sales
• four price changes, and
• eleven sales
We have some new market data up on Montana Land Source. I gave a presentation to the Ag Committee of the Billings Chamber last week, and pulled together some market information. And like I said, that is up live on Montana Land Source. We're very excited and proud of that, we're the only entity that actually has live market statistics on our website. The statistics change every day, or potentially every day, as new listings and new sales come in. And we're looking forward to putting more of that up.
The takeaways from that, it's interesting, we're actually in 2020 not at the same rate of total sales as we were in 2019. Which is a bit of a surprise, given that the market has seemed so hot. But basically, the coronavirus slowed us down early on I think. So we had less sales early in the season and summer, which makes a lot of sense. We're catching up in spades right now. There's an interesting graph that's up on https://mtlandsource.com, that shows this. The real volume of sales activity has been in the last two months of this year, and we still have two months to go. So we anticipate strong sales throughout the year, and we'll see above sales over the course of the year we believe.
Other interesting aspects to the market and to that information, less new listings on the market this year. That was a surprise. Some explanations for that are that again, coronavirus hit early and at prime prep time for putting properties on the market. So that slowed properties from going on the market, and being marketed like they normally would in a normal year. And another possibility, another explanation, is if demand is up for Montana properties like it has been, potentially there are sellers out there who might have put their property on the market in a “normal” year. But given this year, they decided to hold on to it. A lot of the demand for Montana property has been the coronavirus refugee, or shelter-in-place kind of opportunity that Montana land provides. So maybe there are sellers out there that wanted to take that same opportunity, and not put their property on the market. Again, we'll see how the year unfolds. New listings have increased as the year has gone on. So check out https://mtlandsource.com for some of that information.
Another interesting thing I'll mention too, is it's a perennial conversation in Montana. It's pretty common to hear that it's believed that we're under-supplied. A lot of times brokers will talk about having buyers, and there's nothing out there for them. Some of that has to do with pricing. Maybe there's properties out there, but a lot of them are overpriced or there aren't properties of certain types available in the market. Some of what I'm seeing in the market data leads me to believe that we might be heading to a real legitimate lack of supply, more dramatic than the usual in Montana. There's less properties on the market right now than there were a year ago, because of the increased volume of sales and less properties being put on the market. So heading into 2021, I think it's possible that we'll see a lack of supply that's more dramatic than what we've seen in times past. So that's what I have for you on the market. Again, check out https://mtlandsource.com for our live stats.
In news, Episode 10 of the Ranch Investor podcast has dropped. This episode we interviewed Hertha Lund, which was a very interesting and informative episode. Many people will recognize that name, the Lunds in Montana and in Montana real estate. Two of her brothers are land appraisers, and she is an attorney that specializes in land and farm and ag legal issues. So very interesting podcast there. Please check that.
In upcoming events, the Montana MSU Department of Ag Econ usually puts on an event every year as part of their Celebrate Ag Week. They put on a one-day seminar that's very informative on economic issues relative to the Montana ag industry, so commodity prices and trends. Because of coronavirus, they're not going to hold that event live. It's a virtual event that's coming up on Friday. We have information about that up on https://mtlandsource.com."