What is a list-to-sale price ratio?
The list-to-sale price ratio is the final sale price (what a buyer paid for the home) divided by the last list price. The resulting number is expressed as a percentage. If it's above 100%, the home sold for more than the list price.
Our national list-to-sale price ratio is currently 99.3%. This means that if a home were listed for $100,000, on average it would be selling for 0.7% less than the asking price, or $99,300.
When there are lots of homes for sale and few buyers, sellers compete to attract buyers. In buyer's markets like this, buyers are often able to negotiate prices down substantially, and the resulting list-to-sale price ratio falls hovers much farther away from 100%.
Right now, the national list-to-sale price ratio indicates a very tight seller's market around the country. For comparison, in February 2019 it was slightly below 97.5% and in Feb 2020 it was 97.7%.
Although those percentage differences sound insignificant, applied to a $1mm, $2mm, or $3+ mm purchase, they can make a significant difference.
Different price ranges have different list-to-sale price ratios. We pulled the numbers in the $2.9mm+ market this week. For $2.9mm+ sales since May 2020 for the City of Boulder, the average list-to-sale price ratio is 100.11%, with the low being 89.1% and the high being 113.5%. When you break the data down further, it is possible to see that there are still a lot of people who purchase below asking, but sales at asking and above asking in this price point have definitely increased from how the market functioned 12-24 months ago.
