Let’s nerd out on some Platte County real estate as we await Super Bowl week. Make sure you read this on a full stomach if you’re involved in the real estate business, cause the “selling houses like candy bars” days are squarely in the rear-view mirror.
Let’s take a roll back into 2019, before we knew China was going to send a pandemic our way. January of 2019 there were 120 residential sales in Platte County per local MLS data. In 2023 there were 90. Ok, nobody likes buying houses in January, how about summer? July of 2019 there were 238 sales in Platte County and just 128 in 2023.
In five years of data the most total sales in a month were 275 in July of 2020 and the least was 90 in January of 2023. That low point is the only month out of 60 months that dipped below 100 sales in Platte County.
Volume is not great news, but prices are a different story as most people want house prices to stay elevated, as it increases the value of the existing homes.
The median sales price of a home in Platte County in December of 2023 was $350,000. The same median sales price in 2019 was $262,000. The highest monthly median sales price over the last five years was $412,067 in April of 2023 and the lowest was $250,000 in November of 2019. That’s good news, right? Unless you’re buying a house and can’t time travel. Anyway, numbers are numbers.
In this week’s episode of government protecting us from ourselves, let us check in with the City of Kansas City, Missouri, a persistent coddler of the “government can save us from ourselves theory” of governance. The Independence Avenue bridge is famous for box type trucks hitting it because they exceed the height limit of 12 feet.
There is ample signage at the bridge, and this has not prevented people from hitting it for years. So, instead of just letting people pay the ramifications of not being able to read a sign that says 12′, the city has now installed a “warning curtain,” basically, a dangled plastic type curtain that you hit prior to actually hitting the concrete bridge.
Now we wait. And, most certainly someone soon will run through the warning curtain and directly into the bridge, proving that government cannot save us from ourselves, despite their efforts.
Maybe if they instituted a mask mandate for all drivers on Independence Avenue, that would fix it. Can’t ever have too much government to protect us from ourselves.
Maybe we can install a warning curtain for the warning curtain. I’ll probably get some type of government “citizen contribution” engineering thought award for that suggestion, because if there is one thing government likes more than protecting you from yourself it’s giving meaningless awards out like participation trophies at a youth soccer tourney. I’ll let you know when I get my wall certificate.
(Guy Speckman can be reached reading street signs)
