Weekly Scorecard 11-23-09
Well better late than never. I am busy obtaining clock hours for me RE License renewal so a little bit behind. So here goes. The inventories just seem to be stable. This week there was 240 homes on the market. Down from the 247 last week. This time last year inventories were escalating and a lot of it was distressed inventory. This year that does not seem to be the case. It looks like a more traditional cycle where you may have sellers removing inventory from the market for the holidays and then trying again next spring. We will need to wait to see if inventories increase next year.
The sales volume was impressive at 10 homes. However the per sq. ft. sales price was $215; below the traditional $225 per sq. ft. average. So low prices equals greater volume. There was only one bank owned home in this batch of sales. Two sales very interesting. First the bank owned home was on the market for only 9 days and was listed at $360,000 and the closing sale price was $401,000 so it looks like a bidding war occurred here. The per sq. ft. price sales price was pretty low at about $160 per sq. ft. and the home was a “fixer”. We are seeing this strategy used more often by some sellers of listing at an obvious low asking price to generate urgency and it has been working. This strategy relies on the assumption there is a pool of buyers trolling for good deals and this sales method of “obvious value”, brings out those buyers. The other notable sale was a Camwest new home sale. The reason the sale was notable was that the sale price and the list price were the same price and at the original list price; this is a first. As I have discussed before new construction inventory is reaching depletion and good operators like Eric Campbell at Camwest appears are starting to see benefits from this trend. The buyers however have drawn a line in the sand and pricing is very important. The average home sale price this week was $523,590.
There were only three homes that went pending this week. Pretty typical for this time of year. The average listed price was pretty high $619,983 but the per sq. ft. price was $211. So it looks like price sells. It is very evident we have a pool of discretionary buyers that make their purchases on obvious value. I suspect this trend will continue sometime frustrating sellers who anticipate potential price pressure but never see it develop because the buyer refuses to participate in the market. We don’t have enough new job growth moving in to put any upward pressure on pricing. However the good news is that it appears we have enough people with a good job and some savings to purchase when they see the price is right.