Weekly Scorecard 10-26-09
It appears the overall inventory is marching back up. It is now 252 homes. Three weeks ago it bottomed at a little over 230 homes. However this is not a lot of homes for this market which can run over 300 homes but it looks like as our sales volume decreases due to increasing prices and seaonality factors that the inventory is starting to creep back up. Will probably keep heading higher until Q1 next year.
Closed sales this week were 7 homes. Not bad. The week previous had 10 sales but it appears overall sales volumes are slowing down a bit. Average per sq. ft. prices are drifting back to the $220 per sq. ft. and are down from last week’s $235 to $229 this week and overall the average home sale was price was back down to under $500K at $491,514 very typical numbers for East Bellevue. There appeared to be no bank owned or short sale homes in this batch of sales.
Like last week the pending sales volume was low at only 3 homes. The average per sq. ft. price was $219 per sq. ft. There was one short sale in this batch of homes. This is a home that had been pending forever; a short sale new construction home so that one is a little suspect. However the important part is not the specific homes but the overall trend line. If you remember in June we saw the market bounce happen when pending sales vome and per sq. ft. prices were higher than the previous week. Now we see a new trend of lower pending sales volume and per sq. ft. pending prices. Looks like we have had a good little bounce and we will level back out at our traditional numbers.
As I said last week I think we are in a “trading” range where volumes and prices will decline until they get at or under $220 per sq. ft. and then we will probably see sales volumes and sales pick up and move us over the $200 per sq. ft. number. Will probably keep trading around this number until we start seeing real growth in the overall economy.