The Hawaii Island real estate market continues to improve for the third month in a row. The number of sales for single family homes and land saw steep increases in July compared with the other months of improvement. While the number of condos sales did increase month to month, the increase was not as significant as it was with land and single family homes.
What are typically slow months for the Hawaii real estate market, this summer has been busy for LUVA Realtors. While the year to date number of sales shows that there have been less sales so far than in 2019, compared to July 2019 the number of sales this past month has increased 15%, showing that there may be more buyers in the market this summer than there were last summer. One major factor for this increase is land sales, which both saw impressive increases in the Ka’u and Puna markets last month. When we compare prices for the sales so far this year, the median sales price for single family homes has increased almost 3% and condo prices have decreased year to date 4%. This is no surprise, as the condo market has taken a more significant hit than the single family market.
With buyers taking advantage of historically low interest rates, LUVA Realtors are seeing more buyers enter into the market. We are also seeing, more sellers enter into the market as the number of new listings continue to climb back to more normal rates, as they have since earlier this spring. There were 213 new listings in West Hawai’i last month, up from 211 new listings in June and 358 new listings on East Hawai’i, up from 320 in June.