With the third quarter just completed, it’s time for an updated comparison of the past five years’ Flathead County home sales by quarter (see chart). The 2019 bars are gold, and you will notice a serious increase in Q3 (July 1 through Sept. 30) volume this year over all of the recent past. Q3 numbers had been incredibly consistent, for 2015, 2016 and 2018 — with an uncharacteristic upshot in 2017. Well, 2019 just blew by all of those past Q3 quantities. In fact, the increase was so extreme that I had to rerun my calculations to be sure.
Bare land sales, for the same Q3 period, took a shallow decline, compared to 2018 volume. Land sales also had a pullback (2019 vs. 2018) for Q1 and Q2.