Weekly Score Card
Each week, hopefully on Monday evening, I will post the total listings, the number of sold and pending homes. So here goes for this week.
Total Listings – 289
Total Sales – 9; average sales price $498,466, average per sq. ft. sales price $220, average square footage 2,421
Total Pendings – 4; average sale price $498,566, average price per sq. ft. $241, average square footage 2,131
A couple of comments. The data is taken from the MLS for homes sale and pending from 6/8 tp 6/14. It includes both days for a full week. The pendings come from the pending category and no other category such as “pending back up”, pending inspection, etc. In general for a sale to be pending all conditions such as inspections, lien holder approval are to have been satisfied and the sale is waiting to close. The sure sign of a short sale is a “pending back up”. While imperpect by limiting this number just to the pendings it does help to get a better picture of the which homes are truly pending. As I get more techinically proficient we will start putting these in a spreadsheet and graphs.
The big issue in the numbers above is the number of sales is higher than the number of pendings. Usually it is the other way around mainly due to short sales being signed and then taking forever for lien holder approval. I don’t know if this means sales are slowing or there are less short sales. In general East Bellevue has one of the lowest ratios of bank owned and short sale to its general inventory. It could mean some of this inventory is getting depleted but I would need to do a lot more analysis. agents now have boxes to check on their listings to indicate if it is a short sale or bank owned but they are not being used on a reliable basis. The only real way is to check the tax records that are part of the listing to see the status.
The other number that really hops out is the fact the pending per sq. ft. price has usually been below the sold home per sq. ft. price. Again these are short sales being thrown into escrow just to get the negotiation process started with the lender. Also in markets that are graadually declining in the pending number is usually lower than the sold number and in markets appreciating the pending number for both average home sale price and average per sq. ft. price move up. This will be one to keep an eye on. I suspect there may have been some mild uptick in values for homes under $400,000 since that is where the action is.