Well, the time has come time to look at the Albuquerque real estate market for 2020, and give it a let’s just put a bow on it and talk about what happened this year in the real estate market in Albuquerque. If people were following residential real estate at all in 2020, I think everybody recognized that the market has really outperformed every other sector, depending on what you mean by outperformed. Of course, the reality is the market is very strong in Albuquerque right now. We’re in January, but let’s take a look back and see what the actual numbers tell us about what happened. So here we go. I’m going to start right here. I mean, this is the obvious place to look and, and just to give you a little wrap on what we’re looking at here, we’re looking at 2020, the entire year compared to the previous two years.
So 2020, 2019, 2018, when we’re looking at these, we’re looking at just the greater Albuquerque area; I have filtered out some of the additional sales and properties that do end up in our MLS but aren’t necessarily part of the Metro Albuquerque area. So we can really get a really good idea. And, and this is, this is again like I said, this is the place to start. The number of sales percentages are down here. So we had a 4.2% increase in the number of homes sold in the greater Albuquerque area in 2020 versus 2019, which of course was up over 2018. And if you would have said back in March and April, we were going to have an increase in home sales and an increase in home prices; everybody would have thought you were crazy.
Well, you know, it’s, it’s really interesting how the pandemic did affect our real estate market and the perception of real estate and the need to own homes and they want to own homes. Throughout the year, of course, 3% interest rates didn’t hurt either. So close sales, 4% increase number of homes for sale. We really had a big drop. This is averaged out through the entire year when it says 1500 sitting here in January. We’re actually closer to like 900 homes on the market right now, but this is just throughout the whole year. We saw a 36% decrease in the number of homes for sale versus 2019, which again was down from 2018, the number of homes coming on the market throughout the year, there was about 15,000, 15,431 decreased slightly from the year before. So that’s good. We could probably use an additional 3000 homes on the market right now.
No problem would not affect issues with pricing and flood the market. Maybe flood the market a little bit if 3000 came on all at once. But, but right now, we have such low supply that even a big influx to the market would be actually helpful for all those buyers that are out there waiting again. As we sit here in January 2021.
Pricing, let’s look, see what happened with pricing. First, we’re going to look at the median price again. This was throughout the entire year we had the 12 month rolling. We had a 10.2% increase in the median price. And of course, a lot of that was driven by the fact that just lower price homes were in much shorter supply. This is $237,000 it’s the median for the year. But actually, if you look at just December, the most recent month, we’re closer to $250,000 now as the median price in the Albuquerque market.
And if you look at average again for the year $274,000 up 9.6%, so still right around that 10% increase in average price. And if we look at that one on the monthly and let’s just take a look at it real quick. So yeah, the average price for December was at $296,000, definitely an all-time high for the Albuquerque market. So let’s go back to the 12 month rolling, and then let’s look at the price per square foot. I like the price per square foot. It’s a really good indicator of just of overall price movement, because it, it of eliminates the, the variables you get with, you know, like a lot of higher priced home selling and a lot less lower price home selling, which will move the average and medians more. But here, we see a 9.3% increase in the overall average price per square foot.
So we’re up to 141,000. You know, the interesting thing about that, I think back to boy at the, at the low times in our market, back in 2010, 2011, I think a hundred dollars, less than a hundred dollars a square foot was very common. Now we’re at 141 per square foot, and I just leave you with one last thing. I think this is an interesting statistic, which is the total dollar volume of real estate residential real estate sold in the greater Albuquerque area for 2021. It was 3.6, four, 4 billion with a B $3.6 billion in residential real estate sold. The reason I bring that up is the economic impact of real estate sales is, is very large. So w let’s go back to this number here, close sales 13,000 and change. And there’s been a lot of studies about this, how much economic impact is there on an economy when a home sells and The National Association of Realtors did a study for New Mexico. They came up with $72,000 for a new construction home, which is it’s going to be higher than a resale, but even if you scaled that back and you, you, you looked at this number, it’s somewhere around $80 million in economic impact in 2021, Justin again, Metro Albuquerque area, residential real estate sales hat on the local economy. That’s not just, you know, the realtors and the lenders and the title companies and all that stuff, you know, but that’s the home inspectors, but it’s the home stores. It’s the home improvement stores. It’s the remodelers, it’s the painters, it’s all the different trade trades, people that, that do all the different work on these homes. So furniture stores, right? It just, you know, the list goes on and on. So I just want to give a shout out to real estate. And I know it’s been a tough year for so many people.
It’s still tough. And, and the, the good news is everybody, you know, wanting real estate, wanting to own their own home has really helped with our economy. And, and I hope we can keep that going through 2021. So I hope that was interesting. If you ever want to talk real estate, what’s going on with the market. I’m your guy, and I am Tego Venturi, Keller Williams Realty and the Venturi Realty Group. Our phone number is 448-8888. My website, there it is my website. I call it my website because I maintain it. It’s www.welcomehomeAbq.Com. Thanks for watching.