There’s no doubt about it: The August flooding stymied Baton Rouge’s residential real estate market, according to housing sales statistics from that month.
Closed homes sales in the nine-parish Capital Region were down 23.4% in August from the same month a year ago, the Greater Baton Rouge Association of Realtors says in its latest monthly report released today.
Real estate agents in the Capital Region managed to seal the deal on 949 homes in August 2015. That number plummeted to 727 in August 2016.
While the number of closed sales shrunk in all three of the market’s biggest parishes, Livingston Parish—which was hit particularly hard by the flood—saw a dramatic drop. Closed sales there fell a whopping 34.3%, from 178 in August 2015 to 117 in August 2016. Closed sales in East Baton Rouge Parish were down 19.3%, while Ascension Parish saw a 20.6% decrease.
New listings did not change much in East Baton Rouge (up 0.8%) or Ascension (down 0.6%). But Livingston’s listings fell by 6.8%.
“It’s no surprise that Livingston Parish shows the most flooding impact,” the association says in a news release. “Given the situation, inventory in Livingston Parish is likely to remain low for a several months.”
Pending sales for the nine-parish region were up 4.8%, from 877 in August of last year to 919 in August 2016. But new listings are down 2.8%, from 1,123 in August 2015 to 1,092 in the same month this year.
Meanwhile, the months supply—an indicator of how long it would take to sell all the current inventory in the market—also cratered, falling 20.8% from 4.8 in August 2015 to 3.8 in August 2016.
“The impact of the flooding is going to be evident in home sales statistics for many months and quite possibly in ways that are surprising,” the GBRAR release says. “An event like this is unprecedented in our market and exactly what its impact will be remains to be seen.
