Multifamily is where the action is

There’s been plenty of news about how well multi-family housing has been doing, at least compared to single-family properties. It’s not just an anecdotal trend — here’s an interesting piece of information about Virginia property sales.

I looked at two simple sets of data, each comprising a year’s worth of sales:

1. Statewide sales from May 1, 2010 to April 30, 2011 (aka, last year)
2. Statewide sales from May 1, 2011 to April 30, 2012 (aka, this year)

Looking at those two sets of numbers, sales of single-family homes dropped about 2%. Condo sales were down almost 3%. Land sales were down more than 9%.

And multi-family sales were up 16.6%.

Note that this is the number of properties sold, not the total value. Also note that the total number of multi-family sales (about 224,000 in the past 12 months) is about half that of single-family homes.

Still, to see such a big disparity between multi-family sales and everything else is at least worth thinking about, no?

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