As I speak to associations and property managers about FHA Condo Approvals, I use data for condo sales in various towns in Connecticut. I try to select towns that have a lot of condominiums to provide comparison data between projects that are FHA approved and those that are not.
Rocky Hill CT Condo Data for 2013
Rocky Hill has 38 condominium projects of which 10 of them are approved with FHA. Incidentally, of the 10, our office handled 5 of them. There are two more submissions to FHA that are currently in Rejected status. Before FHA’s changes in 2011 there were 22 projects on FHA’s Approved Condominiums List.
Analysis of Data
I typically divide the listing data into those in FHA-approved condos and those that are in non-FHA projects. For my business, it’s good to analyze the difference between the two.
In Rocky Hill, FHA-approved condominiums represent the minority as just 28% of the projects are approved. However, 58% of the condo unit sales in Rocky Hill in 2013 were in the FHA-approved projects. There were 86 sales in the 10 approved projects and only 62 sales in the remaining 28 projects.
The largest contrast between the FHA and non-FHA projects is in the ratio of sold listings and expired/canceled listings. In non-FHA condominiums, listings were more likely to expire (53%) than to sell (40%).
However, in FHA-approved projects, the closed to expired ratio was nearly 3:1. If a unit is listed in an FHA-approved condominium, it is nearly twice as likely to sell as one in a project that is not approved. This creates an obvious disparity between being FHA-certified and not being certified.
To further this point, Woodside Condominiums let its FHA certification lapse in August 2013. There were 6 listings in the project in 2013 and of those, 3 sold and 3 expired. Coincidentally, all three sales occurred during the time it was approved with FHA and the other three expired after the certification expired. Similarly, this occurred in The Hamlet of Enfield in 2013.
The average and median sales prices were in the favor of non-FHA projects due primarily to three condominium projects where units are valued in excess of $250,000, and some as high as $325,000. The average and median active days on the market were roughly the same.
*NOTE: Closed, Expired and Cancelled listing percentages are calculated by removing the currently Active and Pending Sale data to account only for listings that are no longer on the market. There are currently 7 units still on the market that were listed during 2013 and are excluded from the calculations because their final disposition has yet to be determined.
Photo Credit: (c) Can Stock Photo / elenathewise